Keynote Address (see synopsis)

• Henry Jenkins, “Participatory Culture, Lead Use(r)s, and Moral Economy: How Convergence Culture is Changing the Relations Between Producers and Consumers.”

Panel One: Distance (see synopsis)

• Lisa Gitelman, “Writing at a Distance: The Telegraph and ARPAnet”
• Robert MacDougall, on the early telephone and the social construction of distance
• Jason Loviglio, on National Public Radio’s construction of locality and distance through voice

Panel Two: Space (see synopsis)

• Jonathan Sterne, “A Plea for Infrastructure, with Apologies to Harold Innis: I’m Sorry for Macking Your Title, But You Were Still Wrong About That Stuff in ‘A Plea for Time.’”
• Henry Lowood, on the history of Silicon Valley and the “New Hollywood” of the digital age
• Tara McPherson, on networks, nodes, and the hollow pretense of multiculturalism

Panel Three: Identities (see synopsis)

• Leslie Berlin, on Frederick Jackson Turner, Joseph Schumpeter, and Silicon Valley
• Greg Downey, on metadata, labor, and the “Push-Button Library”
• Anna Everett, “The Viral Civil Rights Movement: Race, Space, and Place in Digital Media.”

Synthesis & Discussion (see synopsis)

• Tim Lenoir
• Philip Deloria
• Henry Jenkins

Keynote Address

• AnnaLee Saxenian, “The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy“

New Media and the Environment

• Toby Miller, “After the Internet“
• Kevin DeLuca, on media and the environment [Kevin's multimedia presentation won't really work in podcast form--we hope to post his slides soon]
• Dylan Wolfe, on visual rhetoric and online environmental activism
• Erich Schienke, “Environmental Information Systems and Ecological Governance in China“

Region, Place, and Geography

• Jennifer Light, “Mapping Risk: Cartography as Computation in Social Science and Policy“
• Craig Robertson, on the passport as media
• Fred Turner, “Information Everywhere: What Art Worlds Do for Computers“
• Casey O’Donnell, “Managing the Wild Wild East: Controlling the Frontiers of the Global Videogame Industry“

New Media and the Practice of Scholarship

• Sharon Leon, “Historical Scholarship in the Commons Era“
• William Turkel, “Matter, the New Medium“
• Dan O’Connor, “Postmodern Cowboys: Towards an Ethics of New Media Research“
• Matt Basso, “A West Both Local and Transnational: The Problems and Possibilities of Public History and Digital Scholarship“

Wrap-up Session

• Wrap-up Session led by Robert MacDougall

(Click here for audio podcasts of all talks.)

FRIDAY KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Our keynote speaker was AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information and author, most recently, of The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. Dr. Saxenian’s talk drew from her classic work on the rise of Silicon Valley as a hub of high-tech activity over competitors like Boston’s Route 128, and then took the story forward to describe how immigrant engineers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are transferring their technology entrepreneurship back to emerging regions in their home countries and creating new high-tech centers in places like Taiwan, Israel, China, and India.

SATURDAY PANELS AND DISCUSSIONS

The second day of the symposium saw a full schedule of panels and discussion—our large seminar room was packed with students, faculty, and guests. Speakers at the first Frontiers of New Media Symposium, in 2007, examined the history of new and old media in the particular context of the American West. For the 2009 symposium, we broadened the scope of our vision, talking about regions and frontiers all over the globe, without abandoning our focus on the role of places, spaces, and regions. Supposedly “place-transcending” or “distance-annihilating” media remain, we know, powerfully shaped and defined by local cultures, regional advantages and disadvantages, territorial governments, and by the earth’s environment itself.

Our second day panels were grouped under three topics—“New Media and the Environment,” “Region, Place, and Geography,” and “New Media and the Practice of Scholarship”—but in fact there was considerable overlap and interaction between all the work discussed, despite the wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and topics. This reflects—we hope—the thought put in to planning our conference, but it is also testament to the creativity, curiosity, and intellectual breadth of the scholars assembled.

NEW MEDIA AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Toby Miller (University of California-Riverside) and Kevin DeLuca (University of Utah) began the day by raising tough questions about the impact of media technologies on our environment. Miller challenged our sense of electronic media as “clean” or “green”, urging us to think of our iPods, laptops, and Blackberries as “toxic, industrial age machines,” built to break and destined for landfills. DeLuca juxtaposed the physical beauty of the West with the physical and mental “pollution” created by constant, instant communication. Dylan Wolfe (Clemson) and Erich Schienke (Pennsylvania State) offered more optimistic visions of the relationship between the environment and new media. Wolfe discussed ways environmental activists use new media to defend the natural world, while Schienke described his work on information systems as tools of ecological governance in the People’s Republic of China.

REGION, GEOGRAPHY, AND SPACE

Our second panel featured a mix of history, historical geography, and communications scholarship, organized around relationships between media and place. Jennifer Light (Northwestern) discussed the history of cartography—making maps—as an imperfect aid to computation and social planning. Using Federal Housing Administration maps from the 1930s, Light showed (as Erich Schienke had also done) how maps help us think about and analyze places, but always risk effacing the real places themselves. Craig Robertson (Northeastern) explored the history of the U.S. passport—a form of media that makes it possible for the state to harden its borders, controlling those who are citizens and excluding those who are not. Fred Turner (Stanford) described the Pepsi pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair to illustrate his work on how computers and information technology got attached to free market ideologies. And Casey O’Donnell (University of Georgia) built on AnnaLee Saxenian’s keynote with a talk describing the very different paths taken by the video game industries of India, China, Korea, and Vietnam.

NEW MEDIA AND THE PRACTICE OF SCHOLARSHIP

In our third panel, we put ourselves under the microscope. How are new media changing what we do as scholars—both what we can do, and what we should do? Sharon Leon (George Mason) described her work at the Center for History and New Media, building powerful new tools for historians and other scholars designed to make academic work more collaborative, relevant, and accessible to all. William Turkel (University of Western Ontario), already at the forefront of digital methods in history, discussed what he sees as the next frontier: new 3-D printers and other fabrication devices that may bring us away from our computer screens and back into the physical world. Dan O’Connor (Johns Hopkins) discussed new ethical questions faced by social media researchers, and the unexpected practical difficulties involved in studying communities as connected and media-savvy as the scholars and pollsters who seek to analyze them. Finally, Matt Basso (University of Utah) returned our focus to Utah and the West, describing the work of the American West Center and innovative public history initiatives like the Utah American Indian Digital Archive.

WRAP-UP SESSION

The day’s final panel was a wrap-up session, a wide-ranging discussion in which we worked to synthesize what had gone before. Rob MacDougall (University of Western Ontario), this year’s David Simmons Visiting Professor, gave a talk designed to summarize and package the day’s discussions and to lay out a road map for future work. Then the day’s panelists, along with University of Utah faculty and students, discussed ways to sustain the excitement and momentum generated by the symposium, to advance the study of media history in general and to continue this initiative at the University of Utah.

FEEDBACK

Feedback about the symposium has been very positive. People praised the mix of participants—both the diverse range of disciplines and approaches and also the mix of junior and senior scholars. Of course, every one present praised the setting. The relatively small size of the symposium also seems ideal for maximum interaction and participation. More than one participant made a special point of thanking David Simmons, not just for his support of the symposium but his engagement with it. “It is amazing to have a benefactor who is truly, deeply engaged in the topic, who took the time not only to support our work, but to engage with it by meeting us for dinner and attending the keynote,” Toby Miller wrote in an email. “For me, that was remarkable, in all my decades of working in the field.”

More to come.

Jennifer Light, of Northwestern University, will be talking about “Mapping Risk: Cartography as Computation in Early Twentieth Century Social Science and Policy” This comes out of her work on the history of urban mapping as an analytic tool. (Jennifer is also working on a history of “civic games” in the U.S.–she had a recent article in Technology & Culture on this topic that I enjoyed a lot.) She’ll be followed by Craig Robertson, of Northeastern University, whose research focuses on the intersection of communication history and surveillance. He’ll give us some thoughts from his forthcoming book on the history of the U.S. passport. Stanford’s Fred Turner will then give a talk entitled “Information Everywhere: What Art Worlds Do For Computers.” Fred is an expert on intersections of art, culture, and computing, and his talk considers how art worlds constitute temporary but influential places in which computers can be made to take on cultural meanings. Finally, Casey O’Donnell, of the University of Georgia, will talk about “Managing the Wild, Wild East: Controlling the Frontiers of the Global Videogame Industry.” Casey’s talk, which should really complement AnnaLee Saxenian’s keynote address on regional advantage in high-tech industries, examines the fiercely guarded “frontiers” of the game industry in India as well as China, Korea, and Vietnam.

The 2007 symposium, you may recall, looked at the history of new and old communications media in the particular contest of the American West. For the 2009 symposium, we wanted to broaden the scope of our vision, to talk about regions and frontiers all over the globe, without giving up attention to the role of places and spaces. Supposedly “place-transcending media” remain, we know, powerfully shaped and defined by local cultures, regional advantages or disadvantages, territorial governments, and by the earth’s environment itself.

One way we aim to get at this issue is with a panel on “New Media and the Environment.” This panel will feature Toby Miller, Kevin DeLuca, Dylan Wolfe, and Eric Schienke.  (You can see the complete symposium schedule here.) All of these panelists work, in different ways, on questions of media technology, rhetoric, and environmental politics, both in the sense of activism and ecological governance.

I’ve talked a little about Toby Miller’s work already; he’ll be giving a talk provisionally titled “After the Internet.” He’ll be followed by the University of Utah’s own Kevin DeLuca. Author of Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism, Kevin studies humanity’s relations to nature and how those relations are mediated by technological and ideological discourses. That sounds like a good fit with the work of Dylan Wolfe, an assistant professor of visual communication at Clemson University. He will (I think) be talking about the rhetorical force of images in on-line environmental activism. Finally, Erich Schienke of Pennsylvania State will be talking about environmental information systems and ecological governance in China. Erich, I should add, has a terrific and positively Borgesian list of research interests in his online bio. He writes on, we are told:

“ecology, ethnography, China, sustainable development, environmental ethics, climate change, globalization, discursive imaginaries, scale, urban development, society and the carbon cycle, Deleuze, cinema, the construction of image-events and movement-images, maps, geographic information systems, biodiversity, floatation tanks, ecotectures, loudspeakers, cybernetics, indoor greening, home-scale food production, posture and perception, Bateson, design studies, participatory design, environmental justice, toxic environments, public understanding of science, surveillance and public space, informatic schismogenisis, data reciprocity, Nietzsche, the eternal return, travelling, constructions of knowledge and performances of power, cooking, fermenting things, fishing, science and the state, and panda porn.”

I don’t know how many of those topics Erich can get through in fifteen to twenty minutes, but that sounds like a talk you would not want to miss!

That kind of snap is our great hope for the 2009 symposium. We don’t really know if or how it can be engineered in advance, but we figure the place to start is by bringing together a critical mass of really interesting people with intelligent ideas. So as I describe the topics of our 2009 symposium, now just a few days away, maybe the mix will seem a little eclectic. There are worse things for an academic conference to be. But I’m pretty confident we’ll have some sparks.

Leslie Berlin is the Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford and author of The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley. Leslie responded to our hosts’ request to talk about the frontier as a concept more seriously than any other guest, I think, and gave a great talk (it begins at minute 3:00) that examined the history of Silicon Valley–real and perceived–through the lens of both Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis and Joseph Schumpeter’s ideas of creative destruction.

Greg Downey is the newly appointed Director of the School of  Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  I plugged his terrific book, Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology, and Geography, in my talk. He’s also the author of Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television. The two books are united by Greg’s insistence on studying, and honoring, the human labor that remains part of any information system, no matter how hidden, and this was also a theme of Greg’s talk (begins at 20:00), which took us from the “Push Button Library” at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair to the inescapable question of metadata and the labor needed to produce it.

Anna Everett chairs the department of film studies at UC-Santa Barbara and is the author or editor of multiple books on the intersections of film, television, new media, and race.  Her talk (begins at 55:00) was entitled “The Viral Civil Rights Movement: Race, Space, and Place in Digital Media.” She vigorously challenged challenged ideas of the “digital divide” that paint people of African descent as resistant to technological advances, and offered an optimistic complement to Tara McPherson’s talk earlier in the day.

The middle panel of our second day focused on “Space.” It featured Jonathan Sterne, Henry Lowood, and Tara McPherson. Unfortunately only Jonathan’s talk has been preserved as a podcast; you can hear or download the audio of his talk here (34 min; 32 MB MP3).

Jonathan Sterne is Chair of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, and author of the award-winning, brain-expanding book The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. His talk (which begins at minute 3:05 of the podcast) was entitled, and this is a direct quote, “A Plea for Infrastructure, with Apologies to Harold Innis: I’m Sorry for Macking Your Title, But You Were Still Wrong About That Stuff in ‘A Plea for Time.’” I liked him immediately. The talk ranged from collapsing bridges to Jonathan’s work on the prehistory and history of the MP3 format to ideologies of “liveness” and corporate liberalism in 1950s television, and ended, powerfully and provocatively I thought, by asking if democracy and access are really the best criteria by which to judge communication infrastructure. What if we made justice and care our yardstick for measuring communication systems, even at the cost of open access for all?

Henry Lowood is co-director of the Stanford Humanities Library and a leading historian of video games and interactive simulations. He spoke about the history of Silicon Valley and the “new” Silicon Valley created as the rise of the computer game industry transformed the region from a center of electronics production into a cultural capital, the “New Hollywood” of the digital age.

Tara McPherson is an associate professor of gender studies and critical studies at the University of Southern California, the author of Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South, and co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. She used the work of designers Charles and Ray Eames as a way of connecting–this knocked me out–structures of organizing information and computer code to post-Civil Rights Movement racial logic. It is impossible to see the network at the same time as the node, Tara argued, and this bifurcated vision, she said, helps underwrite modern racism. “Today’s hollow pretense of multiculturalism,” she suggested, “was prefigured by the modular forms of information technology.”

Heady stuff! I’m sorry the audio for Henry and Tara’s talks is lost, but I have no doubt we will have equally fascinating conversations at the 2009 symposium next week.

The first panel of the second day of the 2007 symposium focused on “Distance.” This panel featured Lisa Gitelman, Jason Loviglio, and myself. You can hear or download the audio of our panel here (1 hr 21 min; 74 MB MP3).

Lisa Gitelman is professor of media studies at Catholic University and the author of, among others, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture–a fine example of the kind of intersection between history and media studies that the Frontiers of New Media project aims to support and sustain. Her talk (which begins at about minute 3:25 of the podcast), on “Writing at a Distance,” used two famous “first” messages–Samuel Morse’s “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT,” transmitted by telegraph in 1844, and the first protocols of the ARPANET, forerunner of the internet, in 1969–to consider the technological history of writing at a distance, and the social and cultural construction of both distance and region. We have “always already” been annihilating distance, Lisa concluded. Distance is relative, and near and far are always in flux.

(The University of Utah has a historical ARPANET connection. The initial ARPANET consisted of just four computers, one each at UCLA, UC-Santa Barbara, Stanford, and the University of Utah. The first message transmitted on the fledgling ARPANET was, legend has it, the suitably biblical “Lo!” It was meant to be the more prosaic word “login,” but the system crashed after transmitting the first two letters and had to be restarted.)

I followed Lisa on the panel; my own talk begins at about minute 27:00. I was losing my voice that day and heavily medicated–perhaps that accounts for my rose-colored memories of the symposium?–but did my best to describe my work on the political and commercial construction (or deconstruction) of distance one hundred years ago. The duelling telephone systems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century–AT&T’s national network versus tens of thousands of tiny independent competitors–embodied different cultures of communication: different billing structures, different protocols and priorities, different attitudes about who and what was near or far. (Protip: I get interrupted by some kind of giant evil robot at about minute 51:38.)

Jason Loviglio is Director of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Jason’s talk begins at minute 54:34. From the telegraph and the telephone, Jason turned our attention to radio. His terrific talk, drawing from a cultural history of public radio and specifically the public radio voice, explored the ways NPR programs use voices and accents to convey or perform a nostalgic (and paradoxically cosmopolitan?) sense of localness and place. (Picture the voices of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, or Tom and Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk fame.) It also featured The Lone Ranger, the Grand Ol’ Opry, and the internecine warfare–news to me–between National Public Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, American Public Radio, and Public Radio International.