New Visualities, New Technologies

My book, co-edited with Hille Koskela at the University of Finland, is now out! New Visualities, New Technologies: The New Ecstasy of Communication. Ashgate.

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409403579

Contents: Introduction: ecstatic assemblages of visuality, J. Macgregor Wise; Ecstatic updates: Facebook, identity and the fractal subject, Mark Nunes; Mapping Narbs, Ananda Mitra; Will the real digital girl please stand up?: examining the gap between policy dialogue and girls’ accounts of their digital existence, Jane Bailey and Valerie Steeves; Vision, inertia, and the mobile telephone: on the origins of control space and the spread of sociopolitical cybernetics, John Armitage; 'Right to the image’: images of dignity, representations of humiliation, Hille Koskela; Frames of discontent: social media, mobile intimacy, and the boundaries of media practice, Larissa Hjorth; Creativity on display? Visibility conflicts or the claim for opacity as ethical resource, Ursula Anna Frohne; Performative pictures: camera phones at the ready, Brooke A. Knight; Mobile snapshots: pictorial communication in the age of tertiary orality, Dong-Hoo Lee; Sex, spectatorship, and the ‘Neda’ video: a biopsy, Theresa M. Senft; Index.

Distracted

Just picked up Maggie Jackson’s book, Distracted, which has been getting a lot of discussion this summer (on NPR at least). I've been saying for a while that we need to pay more attention to attention, so I'm glad to see the issues being debated. Might even spur me on to write more about it. Haven’t delved very far into the book [insert cheap Attention Deficit joke here] but did like the following nuanced passage, which nicely balances out the tech and social determinist positions on technology. The state of affairs she’s describing isn’t technology’s fault, but neither is technology blameless.


PowerPoint doesn’t make us dumb, and a judicious use of such slideware likely can help us navigate a world of information overload. I’m not angling for a return to some sort of pastoral, unmechanized Eden in order to halt the erosion of attention. We cannot blame technology for society’s ills. Nor can we fall into the opposite and increasingly commonplace trap of blindly trusting that our new tools will automatically usher us into a glorious new age. The tools we are wholeheartedly embracing today are inherently powerful, and we ignore that truth at our peril. You can use a stick for digging potatoes or stabbing your neighbor, so how you use a stick is important, but equally important is the fact that a stick is not a wheel. It’s crucial that we better understood how our new high-tech tools, from video games to PowerPoint, may be affecting us. Moreover, our tools reflect the values of our times, so it’s no coincidence that PowerPoint is a tool of choice in a world of snippets and sound bites.
p. 21
Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008.