Here are the audio podcasts of each panel from the 2007 Frontiers of New Media Symposium. Click on the title of the panel to play as an MP3, or right-click to download for listening elsewhere. (The 2009 podcasts are available here.)
Here are the audio podcasts of each talk from the 2009 Frontiers of New Media Symposium. Click on the title of the talk to play as an MP3, or right-click to download for listening elsewhere. (The 2007 podcasts are available here.)
The second Frontiers of New Media Symposium, on September 18th and 19th, 2009, was (in our modest opinions) a great success. Fourteen leading scholars of communication, history, and media came together for two days of lively and provocative conversation about the intersection and future of their fields. The participating scholars, University of Utah faculty, students, and guests all came away with new contacts, new energy, and new ideas about the past, present, and future of media and media scholarship.
The symposium is over and it was, I think, a great success. Thanks again to David Simmons for sponsoring this meeting and to all the organizers, the tech help, and all of our participants and guests. It was terrific to meet you all, and all of us here enjoyed and profited from our conversations, formal and informal. I know I’ve been borrowing intelligent things all of you said and passing them off as my own ever since.
More to come.
Our second panel this coming Saturday will continue exploring the persistence of place in supposedly space-annihilating communication networks. It features a mix of history, historical geography, and communications scholarship, grouped under the general theme of “Region, Place, and Geography.” (Here’s the complete symposium schedule.) The speakers on this panel will be Jennifer Light, Craig Robertson, Fred Turner, and Casey O’Donnell.
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.
My post last night (”Sparks“) was supposed to introduce a rundown of some of the topics we’ll be covering at this year’s Frontiers of New Media symposium, but parenthood suddenly intervened. I’m back now to give you a sense of the range of things we’ll be talking about this Saturday. As I said last night, the topics cover a wide range, but I have faith we’ll see some emergent order form amidst the chaos. (At least I hope so, as I’m going to be leading the wrap-up session Saturday afternoon!)
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!
The way I’ve been summarizing the papers at Frontiers of New Media 2007 probably makes the symposium seem more disjointed and chaotic than it was. I wanted to showcase the variety of topics we discussed there, the creativity of the presenters, the sheer number of exciting and provocative ideas. But what I really haven’t been able to get across is the sense of creative sparks popping and connections made between these papers and ideas–the way all these disparate topics really seemed to snap together that weekend two years ago.
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.
The third panel at Frontiers of New Media 2007 was loosely grouped under the title of “Identities,” but by this point in the day the ideas flying around had pretty clearly escaped the boxes the original program laid out for them. You can hear or download the audio of the session here (1h 31 min; 83 MB MP3).
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.
My look back at Frontiers of New Media 2007 continues. The first two parts are here and here.
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.
As this month’s Frontiers of New Media Symposium approaches, I’m continuing my look back at the 2007 symposium and linking to the podcasts made of our conversations there.
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.
