Next Generation Access in a Rural Community Context: An Innovation Analysis

This thesis explores how to resolve the digital divide in Wales. This is important because access to advanced broadband is considered an essential requirement, particularly post-COVID19. UK Government is advocating next generation access (NGA) to capitalise on Industry 4.0. However, the financial costs and complexities of connecting the final few rural areas is a persisting problem area. Hence, this thesis explores new innovative approaches to provide NGA (product) to a final few (market). Studies revealed superfast broadband in remote rural communities has four-fold human, social, environmental and financial capital benefits. Analysis resulted in a new conceptual framework which combines neo-endogenous theories alongside a four-fold capital model to characterise the complex ecosystem. Previous literature focused on either supply or demand, but few studies had investigated both together at the local level. Human & social capital were identified as critical success factors in community-led initiatives, thus providing a theoretical underpinning for this thesis. This study employed a novel mutual business approach utilising the Hybrid Value System (HVS) as an ecosystem connecting the core assets of several stakeholders. Furthermore, the World Bank Social Capital Assessment Tool was modified to investigate social capital fertility to enhance investment. Henceforth, a qualitative multi-method and in-depth intrinsic case study was used to explore the ecosystem. The contribution to knowledge is how to engage multi-stakeholder and multi-capital analysis to resolve the problem area. The results identified human capital productivity, social capital collective action, and shared financial capital are required at the local level to reach the final few. The mutual business paradigm challenges all stakeholders to value non-financial capital alongside financial capital for problem area resolution. This thesis concludes that HVS methodology coupled with complex ecosystem-network visualisation techniques, provide academics, management and government policy makers with practical tools to value four-fold capital resources and bridge the digital divide

If I Had a Hammer: An Archeology of Tactical Media From the Hootenanny to the People\u27s Microphone

American folk music gatekeepers have been rightfully critiqued for positing problematic naturalizations of authenticity. Yet, there are underexplored thinkers and artists across the history of folk music whose relationship to media is more complicated. By drawing on the field of media archeology, this dissertation explores the various diagrams and models of communication that can be pulled from the long American folk revival. Media archeology as described by such thinkers as Jussi Parikka and Siegfried Zielinski is not a conventionally linear means of narrating media history; media archeology rather seeks to uncover forgotten and all-but-lost potentialities within our historical media ecologies. In this way, drawing also on the work of Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I explore the subterranean but vivid discourse on technology offered by several key players in American folk music history. I begin by closely reading the work, writings, and eclectic projects of Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger. Lomax’s anthropological and folkloristic research was grounded in a myriad of both analogue and digital media; he pioneered the use of sound-recording technology in the field, used IBM mainframes to analyze musicological data in the sixties, and even experimented with personal computers and multimedia software in the eighties and nineties. I probe Lomax’s writings to find an anomalous and productive conception of the digital. Second, I look at Pete Seeger’s complicated relationship to McLuhan; despite his problems with the Torontonian superstar, Seeger’s own thought works towards a similarly medium-specific understanding of resistance. Chapter 3 considers Steve Jobs’s and Apple’s mobilization of Bob Dylan’s work and star image. Although Apple’s effacement of the machine has roots in Dylan’s own artistic lineage (via Romanticism), we can also find a post-humanist Dylan—one interested in noise, machines, and parasites. The final chapter explores through-lines between the “Hootenanny” parties held by Woody Guthrie and his friends in the early 1940s and more recent mobile, music-making iPhone apps, with a final stop at the Occupy movement’s “People’s Microphone.” These exploratory case studies bring to light a set of connections and convergences between digital history, folk music, and critical theory

Bibliography of Lewis Research Center technical publications announced in 1993

This compilation of abstracts describes and indexes the technical reporting that resulted from the scientific and engineering work performed and managed by the Lewis Research Center in 1993. All the publications were announced in the 1993 issues of STAR (Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports) and/or IAA (International Aerospace Abstracts). Included are research reports, journal articles, conference presentations, patents and patent applications, and theses

Video Conferencing: Infrastructures, Practices, Aesthetics

The COVID-19 pandemic has reorganized existing methods of exchange, turning comparatively marginal technologies into the new normal. Multipoint videoconferencing in particular has become a favored means for web-based forms of remote communication and collaboration without physical copresence. Taking the recent mainstreaming of videoconferencing as its point of departure, this anthology examines the complex mediality of this new form of social interaction. Connecting theoretical reflection with material case studies, the contributors question practices, politics and aesthetics of videoconferencing and the specific meanings it acquires in different historical, cultural and social contexts