The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Fragility

Impermanence and fragility have become the defining conditions of the digital age. Technologies that were ubiquitous barely a decade ago, like floppy disks, now look like archaeological relics. It takes only a few years, if not months, before software environments are replaced by newer versions, often with limited backward compatibility. At the same time, digital technologies rely on hardware that has short life expectancy. The radical obsolescence of this new digital register raises a number of important questions. How are we going to prevent the fragile memories of contemporary digital cultures from receding into oblivion? This essay answers this question by looking at one of the institutions in which the problems associated with digital fragility are most especially felt, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and by exploring the ontological displacements that digital objects are operating at the heart of the museum

Media Ecologies

In this chapter, we frame the media ecologies that contextualize the youth practices we describe in later chapters. By drawing from case studies that are delimited by locality, institutions, networked sites, and interest groups (see appendices), we have been able to map the contours of the varied social, technical, and cultural contexts that structure youth media engagement. This chapter introduces three genres of participation with new media that have emerged as overarching descriptive frameworks for understanding how youth new media practices are defi ned in relation and in opposition to one another. The genres of participation—hanging out, messing around, and geeking out—refl ect and are intertwined with young people’s practices, learning, and identity formation within these varied and dynamic media ecologies

Strengthening Resilience by thinking of Knowledge as a nutrient connecting the local person to global thinking: The case of Social Technology/Tecnologia Social

In this chapter, we describe the Knowledge as a Nutrient framework that emerged from these conversations. We describe how it relates to the Tecnologia Social policy approach to sustainability, developed in Brazil (Dagnino et al. 2004, Fundação Banco do Brasil 2009, Costa 2013), which is not well known in the anglophone world. Tecnologia Social was both inspired by and rooted in Paulo Freire’s pedagogical thinking (2000, Klix 2014).   We show how this framework has the potential to increase community resilience and adaptive capacity, not only for communities that face and must adapt to climate change but for all communities in the throes of complex social, ecological, economic and political transitions.This research was supported by the International Development Research Centre, grant number IDRC GRANT NO. 106002-00

Conversational ecologies

This project takes a transdisciplinary approach to spatial interactivity, incorporating elements of theoretical discourse, speculative design, narrative worldbuilding, making, scientific experimentation and video. To me it is destructive to segregate bodies of knowledge, or any bodies for that matter, and it denies the synergism that is possible with transdisciplinary work. I combine scientific materiality with imagined alechemies and interweave these throughout the text with borrowed and original philosophical contemplations to more fully grapple with the shifting complexities of Conversational Ecologies. I firmly believe that due to the complex, multisensorial nature of interactivity, the discourse must exist outside of just the written. This discourse can exist simultaneously as fantasy and reality–as long as it engages the senses and encourages people to reconsider their ecological positionalities. This theoretical, textual body acts as both a beginning for these experiments, and as a site to re-incorporate what I learn ‘in the field.

Vital data : writing and circulating data in non-profits.

This dissertation presents the results of an ethnographically-informed workplace observation study of a single non-profit referred to throughout as “the Metro Data Coalition” (MDC). It begins with an overview of the organization, its institutional history, the technical and technological scenes of composing, and the demands placed on the writing process by each of these variables. It considers usability studies, activity theory, and rhetorical ecologies in coming to terms with how MDC writers shape the numerical data they work with daily. The latter half of the dissertation considers how MDC writers approach their work as “storytellers,” a self-concept that is threaded throughout their writing process, and the ways in which MDC team members and those of their parent non-profit—the City-Community Partnership—shape a circulation process in a bid to measure the MDC’s rhetorical “impact.” The dissertation is divided into six parts. The introduction and Chapter 1 serve to set the scene of the MDC, their organization, their purpose, and their writing processes. I argue here that their organizational ethos is imposed by a range of structural and historical forces, and ultimately runs into conflict with their mission statement. In Chapter 2, I zoom in on the technologically-mediated data visual composing process and make a case for a vision of distributed creativity that suits technical writing scholarship. In Chapter 3, I focus on the organization’s and individual team members’ approaches to “story” and “storytelling,” and argue that “storytelling” is itself an action that is distributed across a perceived ecology of MDC work and circulation, and that the goal is a sense of “stickiness” that is ultimately fraught in our present, hyper-digitized and ecological age. Chapter 4 takes up the issue of “mission impact,” and the ways in which ecologies of work are shaped and re-shaped in a bid to prove rhetorical success of MDC work. Here, I argue that a story’s “stickiness” cannot be read by one-to-one uptake of arguments, but instead by evidence of re-telling in other organizations. In the conclusion, I emphasize external organizations and the way MDC data has been approached, ultimately suggesting that the technical, quantitative writing the organization engages with is unsuited to the rapidity with which quantitative information can be shaped and re-shaped to align with previously-held, culturally infused “stories.” Ultimately, this project is designed to provide a set of workable heuristics for understanding how quantitative information can be shaped and deployed in technical and professional writing scenarios. It is a study of the “life” of data and the many mutations that happen within that “lifecycle.” To get there, however, it is necessary to engage with real-world writers doing heavily quantitatively-informed work, and to come to terms with the non-numerical, “subjective” forces that shape how we approach “data” in the 21st Century

Digital humanities

Digital technologies continue to entangle themselves more deeply in our everyday lives in various ways; however, two key aspects can be seen as particularly dominant: an increasing recognition of the materiality of the digital and the role of ‘big data’ in controlling—indeed, structuring—us. The emergence of ubiquitous computing in the form of the Internet of Things that connects devices and their users physically within cybernetic networks can be seen through the increasing popularity of wearable devices and ‘smart’ home technologies. Meanwhile, the operations of big data reconfigure human subjects into ‘users’, defined by quantification and shaped by algorithmic processes. Undergoing such datafication, we are interpellated—often voluntarily, occasionally through coercion—into systems that leave us prone to surveillance by corporations, governmental agencies and cybercriminals. Recent macro-events—the crippling cyberattack on the UK’s National Health Service (May 2017), the catastrophic outage of British Airways’ IT infrastructure (May 2017) and the shadowy role played by data mining/analysis companies in the US Presidential Election and Brexit Referendum in the second half of 2016—have demonstrated how vulnerable today’s digital citizens are. This chapter considers seven publications from 2016 that reflect these concerns with materiality and datafication in various ways, first surveying three major essay collections that seek to explore longstanding issues or stimulate new reflections on our immersions within digital culture. Discussion then moves to examine ‘media archaeological’ approaches to computing, in Matthew Kirschenbaum’s literary history of the word processor and Tung-Hui Hu’s prehistory of the cloud—both offering new insights into everyday computational technologies that provoke a reconsideration of our interactions with them. The chapter then turns to quantification, by examining Deborah Lupton’s analysis into the ways in which digital self-tracking has coalesced around the Quantified Self movement, and to the risks to our lives and liberties through the increasing dominance of big data in analysing and controlling social policy interrogated by Cathy O’Neil

Reassembling an ecology of digital platforms: From interoperability towards convergence

The sociological analysis of digital platforms and infrastructures has almost always been carried out through methodological atomism. They have been observed as unconnected and isolated objects and the issue of their interconnection has been largely neglected. Yet, the topic of interoperability is very relevant today and calls for sociological contribution, especially in the wake of the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. This preliminary paper aims at experimenting with an ecological gaze on digital platforms and infrastructures. An attempt has thus been made to move the focus from the microscope slide isolating each platform to the wider interconnected ecological tangle they chorally perform. To observe reassemble the ecology, the technical concept of ‘interoperability’ has been followed and three stories of interoperability have been described. These stories have been collected at a large university in central Italy. The research shows that the interconnection between platforms happens as an intertwining of technical and social aspects. In the stories collected, interoperability is inscribed with values, hidden cultures, beliefs that express normative ideas and orders of value. Also, it is practically accomplished through collaborative processes, articulation of work and ruses. Digital platforms are thus performative not only as isolated entities: the convergence between platforms – i.e., the ecological ‘coming together’ of platforms – does work on the world too and is endowed with its own agency. Such convergence is dense with values, never detached from social processes, and happens around more or less opaque seam

Narrative environments: how do they matter?

The significance and possible senses of the phrase 'narrative environment' are explored. It is argued that 'narrative environment' is not only polysemous but also paradoxical; not only representational but also performative; and not just performatively repetitive but also reflexive and constitutive. As such, it is useful for understanding the world of the early 21st century. Thus, while the phrase narrative environment can be used to denote highly capitalised, highly regulated corporate forms, i.e. "brandscapes", it can also be understood as a metaphor for the emerging reflexive knowledge-work-places in the ouroboric, paradoxical economies of the 21st century. Narrative environments are the media and the materialities through which we come to comprehend that world and to act in those economies. Narrative environments are therefore, sophistically, performative-representative both of the corporate dominance of life worlds and of the undoing of that dominance, through the iterative responses to the paradoxical injunction: "learn to live"

The Piratical Ethos: Textual Activity and Intellectual Property in Digital Environments

The Piratical Ethos: Textual Activity and Intellectual Property in Digital Environments examines the definition, function, and application of intellectual property in contexts of electronically mediated social production. With a focus on immaterial production - or the forms of coordinated social activity employed to produce knowledge and information in the networked information economy - this project ultimately aims to demonstrate how current intellectual property paradigms must be rearticulated for an age of digital (re)production. By considering the themes of Piracy , Intellectual Property , and Distributed Social Production this dissertation provides an overview of the current state of peer production and intellectual property in the Humanities and Writing Studies. Next, this project develops and implements a communicational-mediational research methodology to theorize how both discursive and material data lend themselves to a more nuanced understanding of the ways that technologies of communication and coordination effect attitudes toward intellectual property. After establishing both a methodology and an interdisciplinary grounding for the themes of the work, this dissertation presents a grounded theoretic analysis of piratical discourse to reveal what I call the piratical ethos , or the guiding attitudes of individuals actively contesting intellectual property in piratical acts of distributed social production. Congruently, this work also investigates the material dynamics of piratical activity by analyzing the cultural-historical activity systems wherein piratical subjectivity emerges, emphasizing the agenic capacity of interfacial technologies at the scales of user and system. Exploring the attitudes of piratical subjects and the technological genres that mediate piratical activity, I contend that the conclusions drawn from The Piratical Ethos can assist Writing Studies researchers with developing novel methodologies to study the intersections of intellectual property and distributed social production in digital worlds

Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice

A survey of a range of disciplines whose practitioners are venturing into the new field of digital rhetoric, examining the history of the ways digital and networked technologies inhabit and shape traditional rhetorical practices as well as considering new rhetorics made possible by current technologie