Rowan Wilken

Vertical geomediation: The automation and platformization of photogrammetry

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 07-10-2022

DOI: 10.1177/14614448221122214

Abstract: Photogrammetry is the science of using photographs to make measurements and derive three-dimensional (3D) data about objects or terrain from two-dimensional (2D) imaging. In this article we view photogrammetry through the lens of geomedia studies, arguing two things. First, we suggest the accumulation and concentration of photogrammetric capabilities, technologies and knowledge, from the First World War onwards can be understood as both part of the 20th-century creation of a ‘government machine’, and a crucial element within the longer-run ‘cartographic project’. Through both world wars and the post-war period, aerial photogrammetry emerged as a fundamental capability for government-supported geomedia infrastructure and spatial information capture – what we term an extended geomedia infosphere. Second, we examine the critical dynamics of digitization, automation and platformization. These developments, we argue, have led to a redistribution of photogrammetric capabilities and technologies outside governmental cartography, with implications for platforms and geomedia studies.

The relational ontology of mobile touchscreens and the body: Ambient proprioception and risk during COVID-19

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 09-2023

DOI: 10.1177/20501579221117434

Abstract: In this article, we explore the tension between the significance of touch as a vital sensory modality of human experience and how, with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, proximity and (tactile) intimacy with other bodies in urban and domestic spaces becomes fraught with the risk of viral contagion. Informed by haptic media studies, the corporeal or sensory turn in contemporary theory, and phenomenology-informed mobile media studies, we examine the possible impacts for mobile device use of the risks of viral contagion associated with our routinized uses of haptic interfaces. We also examine the role and possibility of mobile haptics and the touchscreen in these contexts, and our capacity—via embodied and material metaphor—to extend corporeal reach through the mobile interface. Our contention is that, while the “stand in” for touch that mobile media offers may be perpetually incomplete, the “as-if” structure of habitual experience can play a significant role in narrowing the sensorial gap.

“Waiting for the Kiss of Life”: Mobile Media and Advertising

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 30-10-2009

DOI: 10.1177/1354856509342343

Abstract: Mobile media, especially cellphones, are now seen and heard everywhere, forming an intrinsic part of the daily lives and habits of billions of people worldwide. Curiously, despite this wide diffusion and remarkable rate of adoption, as an advertising platform the cellphone is, in the words of one commentator, still very much ‘a mass medium waiting for the kiss of life’. This article examines why this is the case, by exploring the ‘complex mobile phone ecosystem’ and the factors that contribute to the rather hesitant adoption of mobile advertising, with particular attention to the inherent conflicts amongst the interested parties in the system. It does this through a meta-analysis of themes and issues evinced in mainstream media and the advertising trade press. Study of this data is supplemented by drawing on a number of critical studies within the available research literature on the subject.

Social Media, Small Business, and the Control of Information

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 13-12-2015

DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2014.989249

Entering the graveyard shift: Disassembling the australian TiVo

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 23-10-2015

DOI: 10.1177/1527476413505919

Abstract: This article analyzes the operation and subsequent failure of TiVo in Australia. Drawing on actor-network theory, we unpack the TiVo assemblage throughout our paper, and look at the various human, technical, and institutional interventions that constituted it and constrained its possible futures. This analysis will be conducted by tracing how TiVo attempted to establish itself as a viable social and technical assemblage and assessing its influence on “new locales of regulation, new practices, new ethical stances, and new institutions.” Our approach offers an inclusive analytical lens by considering how a collection of actors—large and small, human and nonhuman—were actively involved in assembling and disassembling the network required by TiVo for an ongoing presence in Australia. It also contributes to a growing body of work that outlines the usefulness of ANT to media studies scholarship.

Places Nearby: Facebook as a Location-based Social Media Platform

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 25-07-2014

DOI: 10.1177/1461444814543997

Abstract: This article examines the growing importance of Facebook as a location-focused platform. Facebook’s approach has been cautious but deliberate. However, following the strategic acquisitions of location-sharing start-ups Gowalla and Glancee, Facebook has r ed up its location-based services: they launched their Nearby feature in December 2012, and adjusted their application programming interface (API) in early 2013 to enable ‘seamless’ location-sharing across third-party applications. These, and more recent acquisitions, are part of ambitious, longer-term moves that reposition Facebook as a local recommendation service (taking on Foursquare and Yelp), and, significantly, establish Facebook as a key local, and increasingly mobile-centred, advertising portal (taking on Google).

Sleeping with the Enemy: Disintermediation in Internet Advertising

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 08-2009

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X0913200110

Abstract: The advent of internet advertising has changed the basis of the intermediary role which the advertising agency traditionally has occupied between advertisers and the media. This is disintermediation, or ‘cutting out the middle man’. The intrinsic and distinctive properties of the internet as a commercial medium, and its interactive character, have given rise to the phenomenon of search advertising, which diminishes the need for an advertising agency. This article outlines and analyses the challenge which Google and the other search services pose to advertising agencies, and the strategies which the global advertising industry has been taking up in response. In particular, evidence of Google's steps towards assuming the functions of an advertising agency, and even of a traditional advertising media owner, are canvassed, and set against an account of the global agency groups’ moves into specialist digital companies, and how they are working with the search services.

Techniques of the tactile body: A cultural phenomenology of toddlers and mobile touchscreens

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 04-12-2018

DOI: 10.1177/1354856518815040

Abstract: A key dimension of young children’s mobile media engagement and play centres on their embodied relations, and how these are shaped with and through the interfaces, materiality and mobility of haptic media. This article explores these embodied dimensions of young children’s mobile media use, drawing on research from (1) ethnographic observation of young children’s play practices in family homes, (2) analysis of videos of young children’s tactile media interaction shared on YouTube and (3) analysis of user interface (UI) and mobile app developer literature, such as the ‘Event Handling Guide for iOS’, which encodes touchscreen interaction through the design constraints and possibilities of gesture input techniques. Taking as its starting point Marcel Mauss’ famous reflection on body techniques, this article draws on past and present research on mobile technologies, tactility and everyday life, to explore what might be involved in developing a ‘cultural phenomenology’ of mobile touchscreens. This research and analysis reveals the emergence of what we term a haptic habitus or cultivation of embodied dispositions for touchscreen conduct and competence.

Fantasies of Control: Numb3rs, Scientific Rationalism, and the Management of Everyday Security Risks

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 04-2011

DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2011.553941

Walkie-Talkies, Wandering, and Sonic Intimacy

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 14-08-2019

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.1581

Abstract: IntroductionThis short article examines contemporary artistic use of walkie-talkies across two projects: Saturday (2002) by Sabrina Raaf and Walk That Sound (2014) by Lukatoyboy. Drawing on Dominic Pettman’s notion of sonic intimacy, I argue that both artists incorporate walkie-talkies as part of their explorations of mediated wandering, and in ways that seek to capture sonic ambiances and intimacies. One thing that is striking about both these works is that they rethink what’s possible with walkie-talkies both artists use them not just as low-tech, portable devices for one-to-one communication over distance, but also—and more strikingly—as (covert) recording equipment for capturing, while wandering, snippets of intimate conversation between passers-by and the “voice” of the surrounding environment. Both artworks strive to make the familiar strange. They prompt us to question our preconceived perceptions of, and affective engagements with, the people and places around us, to listen more attentively to the voices of others (and the “Other”), and to aurally inhabit in new ways the spaces and places we find ourselves in and routinely pass through.The walkie-talkie is an established, simple communication device, consisting of a two-way radio transceiver with a speaker and microphone (in some cases, the speaker is also used as the microphone) and an antenna (Wikipedia). Walkie-talkies are half-duplex communication devices, meaning that they use a single radio channel: only one radio on the channel can transmit at a time, but many can listen when a user wishes to talk, they must turn off the receiver and turn on the transmitter by pressing a push-to-talk button (Wikipedia). In some models, static—known as squelch—is produced each time the push-to-talk button is depressed. The push-to-talk button is a feature of both projects: in Saturday, it transforms the walkie-talkie into a cheap, portable recorder-transmitter. In Walk That Sound, rapid fire exchanges of conversation using the push-to-talk button feature strongly.Interestingly, walkie-talkies were developed during World War Two. While they continue to be used within certain industrial settings, they are perhaps best known as a “quaint” household toy and “fun tool” (Smith). Early print ads for walkie-talkie toys marketed them as a form of both spyware for kids (with the Gabriel Toy Co. releasing a 007-themed walkie-talkie set) and as a teletechnology for communication over distance—“how thrilling to ‘speak through space!’”, states one ad (Statuv “New!”). What is noteworthy about these early ads is that they actively promote experimental use of walkie-talkies. For instance, a 1953 ad for Vibro-Matic “Space Commander” walkie-talkies casts them as media transmission devices, suggesting that, with them, one can send and receive “voice – songs – music” (Statuv “New!”). In addition, a 1962 ad for the Knight-Kit walkie-talkie imagines “you’ll find new uses for this exciting walkie-talkie every day” (Statuv “Details”). Resurgent interest in walkie-talkies has seen them also promoted more recently as intimate tools “for communication without asking permission to communicate” (“Nextel”) this is to say that they have been marketed as devices for synchronous or immediate communication that overcome the limits of asynchronous communication, such as texting, where there might be substantial delays between the sending of a message and receipt of a response. Within this context, it is not surprising that Snapchat and Instagram have also since added “walkie-talkie” features to their messaging services. The Nextel byline, emphasising “without asking permission”, also speaks to the possibilities of using walkie-talkies as rudimentary forms of spyware.Within art practice that explores mediated forms of wandering—that is, walking while using media and various “remote transmission technologies” (Duclos 233)—walkie-talkies hold appeal for a number of reasons, including their particular aesthetic qualities, such as the crackling or static sound (squelch) that one encounters when using them their portability their affordability and, the fact that, while they can be operated on multiple channels, they tend to be regarded primarily as devices that permit two-way, one-to-one (and therefore intimate, if not secure) remote communication. As we will see below, however, contemporary artists, such as the aforementioned earlier advertisers, have also been very attentive to the device’s experimental possibilities. Perhaps the best known (if possibly apocryphal) ex le of artistic use of walkie-talkies is by the Situationist International as part of their explorations in urban wandering (a revolutionary strategy called dérive). In the Situationist text from 1960, Die Welt als Labyrinth (Anon.), there is a detailed account of how walkie-talkies were to form part of a planned dérive, which was organised by the Dutch section of the Situationist International, through the city of Amsterdam, but which never went ahead:Two groups, each containing three situationists, would dérive for three days, on foot or eventually by boat (sleeping in hotels along the way) without leaving the center of Amsterdam. By means of the walkie-talkies with which they would be equipped, these groups would remain in contact, with each other, if possible, and in any case with the radio-truck of the cartographic team, from where the director of the dérive—in this case Constant [Nieuwenhuys]—moving around so as to maintain contact, would define their routes and sometimes give instructions (it was also the director of the dérive’s responsibility to prepare experiments at certain locations and secretly arranged events.) (Anon.) This proposed dérive formed part of Situationist experiments in unitary urbanism, a process that consisted of “making different parts of the city communicate with one another.” Their ambition was to create new situations informed by, among other things, encounters and atmospheres that were registered through dérive in order to reconnect parts of the city that were separated spatially (Lefebvre quoted in Lefebvre and Ross 73). In an interview with Kristin Ross, Henri Lefebvre insists that the Situationists “did have their experiments I didn’t participate. They used all kinds of means of communication—I don’t know when exactly they were using walkie-talkies. But I know they were used in Amsterdam and in Strasbourg” (Lefebvre quoted in Lefebvre and Ross 73). However, as Rebecca Duclos points out, such use “is, in fact, not well documented”, and “none of the more well-known reports on situationist activity […] specifically mentions the use of walkie-talkies within their descriptive narratives” (Duclos 233). In the early 2000s, walkie-talkies also figured prominently, alongside other media devices, in at least two location-based gaming projects by renowned British art collective Blast Theory, Can You See Me Now? (2001) and You Get Me (2008). In the first of these projects, participants in the game (“online players”) competed against members of Blast Theory (“runners”), tracking them through city streets via a GPS-enabled handheld computer that runners carried with them. The goal for online players was to move an avatar they created through a virtual map of the city as multiple runners “pursued their avatar’s geographical coordinates in real-time” (Leorke). As Dale Leorke explains, “Players could see the locations of the runners and other players and exchange text messages with other players” (Leorke 27), and runners could “read players’ messages and communicate directly with each other through a walkie-talkie” (28). An audio stream from these walkie-talkie conversations allowed players to eavesdrop on their pursuers (Blast Theory, Can You See Me Now?).You Get Me was similarly structured, with online players and “runners” (eight teenagers who worked with Blast Theory on the game). Remotely situated online players began the game by listening to the “personal geography” of the runners over a walkie-talkie stream (Blast Theory, You Get Me). They then selected one runner, and tracked them down by navigating their own avatar, without being caught, through a virtual version of Mile End Park in London, in pursuit of their chosen runner who was moving about the actual Mile End Park. Once their chosen runner was contacted, the player had to respond to a question that the runner posed to them. If the runner was satisfied with the player’s answer, conversation switched to “the privacy of a mobile phone” in order to converse further if not, the player was thrown back into the game (Blast Theory, You Get Me). A key aim of Blast Theory’s work, as I have argued elsewhere (Wilken), is the fostering of interactions and fleeting intimacies between relative and complete strangers. The walkie-talkie is a key tool in both the aforementioned Blast Theory projects for facilitating these interactions and intimacies.Beyond these well-known ex les, walkie-talkies have been employed in productive and exploratory ways by other artists. The focus in this article is on two specific projects: the first by US-based sound artist Sabrina Raaf, called Saturday (2002) and the second by Serbian sound designer Lukatoyboy (Luka Ivanović), titled Walk That Sound (2014). Sonic IntimaciesThe concept that gives shape and direction to the analysis of the art projects by Raaf and Lukatoyboy and their use of walkie-talkies is that of sonic intimacy. This is a concept of emerging critical interest across media and sound studies and geography (see, for ex le, James Pettman Gallagher and Prior). Sonic intimacy, as Dominic Pettman explains, is composed of two simultaneous yet opposing orientations. On the one hand, sonic intimacy involves a “turning inward, away from the wider world, to more private and personal experiences and relationships” (79). While, on the other hand, it also involves a turning outward, to seek and heed “the voice of the world” (79)—or what Pettman refers to as the “vox mundi” (66). Pettman conceives of the “vox mundi” as an “ecological voice”, whereby “all manner of creatures, agents, entities, objects, and phenomena” (79) have the opportunity to speak to us, if only we were prepared to listen to our surroundings in new and different ways. In a later passage, he also refers to the “vox mundi” as a “carrier or potentially enlightening alterity” (83). Voices, Pettman writes, “transgress the neat isions we make between ‘us’ and ‘them’, at all scales and junctures” (6). Thus, Pettman’s suggestion is that “by listening to the ‘voices’ that lie dormant in the surrounding world […] we may in turn foster a more sustainable relationship with [the] local matrix of specific existences” (85), be they human or otherwise.This formulation of sonic intimacy provides a productive conceptual frame for thinking through Raaf’s and Lukatoyboy’s use of walkie-talkies. The contention in this article is that these two projects are striking for the way that they both use walkie-talkies to explore, simultaneously, this double articulation or dual orientation of sonic intimacy—a turning inwards to capture more private and personal experiences and conversations, and a turning outwards to capture the vox mundi. Employing Pettman’s notion of sonic intimacy as a conceptual frame, I trace below the different ways that these two projects incorporate walkie-talkies in order to develop mediated forms of wandering that seek to capture place-based sonic ambiances and sonic intimacies.Sabrina Raaf, Saturday (2002)US sound artist Sabrina Raaf’s Saturday (2002) is a sound-based art installation based on recordings of “stolen conversations” that Raaf gathered over many Saturdays in Humboldt Park, Chicago. Raaf’s work harks back to the early marketing of walkie-talkie toys as spyware. In Raaf’s hands, this device is used not for engaging in intimate one-to-one conversation, but for listening in on, and capturing, the intimate conversations of others. In other words, she uses this device, as the Nextel slogan goes, for “communication without permission to communicate” (“Nextel”). Raaf’s inspiration for the piece was twofold. First, she has noted that “with the overuse of radio frequency bands for wireless communications, there comes the increased occurrence of crossed lines where a private conversation becomes accidentally shared” (Raaf). Reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation (1974), in which surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) records the conversation of a couple as they walk through crowded Union Square in San Francisco, Raaf used a combination of walkie-talkies, CB radios, and “various other forms of consumer spy […] technology in order to actively harvest such communication leaks” (Raaf). The second source of inspiration was noticing the “sheer quantity of non-phone, low tech, radio transmissions that were constantly being sent around [the] neighbourhood”, transmissions that were easily intercepted. These conversations were eclectic in composition and character:The transmissions included communications between gang members on street corners nearby and group conversations between friends talking about changes in the neighbourhood and their families. There were raw, intimate conversations and often even late night sex talk between potential lovers. (Raaf)What struck Raaf about these conversations, these transmissions, was that there was “a furtive quality” to most of them, and “a particular daringness to their tone”.During her Saturday wanderings, Raaf complemented her recordings of stolen snippets of conversation with recordings of the “voice” of the surrounding neighbourhood—“the women singing out their windows to their radios, the young men in their low rider cars circling the block, the children, the ice cream carts, etc. These are the sounds that are mixed into the piece” (Raaf).Audience engagement with Saturday involves a kind of austere intimacy of its own that seems befitting of a surveillance-inspired sonic portrait of urban and private life. The piece is accessed via an interactive glove. This glove is white in colour and about the size of a large gardening glove, with a Velcro strap that fastens across the hand, like a cycling glove. The glove, which only has coverings for thumb and first two fingers (it is missing the ring and little fingers) is wired into and rests on top of a roughly A4-sized white rectangular box. This box, which is mounted onto the wall of an all-white gallery space at the short end, serves as a small shelf. The displayed glove is illuminated by a discrete, bent-arm desk l , that protrudes from the shelf near the gallery wall. Above the shelf are a series of wall-mounted colour images that relate to the project. In order to hear the soundtrack of Saturday, gallery visitors approach the shelf, put on the glove, and “magically just press their fingertips to their forehead [to] hear the sound without the use of their ears” (Raaf). The glove, Raaf explains, “is outfitted with leading edge audio electronic devices called ‘bone transducers’ […]. These transducers transmit sound in a very unusual fashion. They translate sound into vibration patterns which resonate through bone” (Raaf).Employing this technique, Raaf explains, “permits a new way of listening”:The user places their fingers to their forehead—in a gesture akin to Rodin’s The Thinker or of a clairvoyant—in order to tap into the lives of strangers. Pressing different combinations of fingers to the temple yield plural viewpoints and group conversations. These sounds are literally mixed in the bones of the listener. (Raaf) The result is a (literally and figuratively) touching sonic portrait of Humboldt Park, its residents, and the “voice” of its surrounding neighbourhoods. Through the unique technosomatic (Richardson) apparatus—combinations of gestures that convey the soundscape directly through the bones and body—those engaging with Saturday get to hear voices in/of/around Humboldt Park. It is a portrait that combines sonic intimacy in the two forms described earlier in this article. In its inward-focused form, the gallery visitor-listener is positioned as a voyeur of sorts, listening into stolen snippets of private and personal relationships, experiences, and interactions. And, in its outward-focused form, the gallery visitor-listener encounters a soundscape in which an array of agents, entities, and objects are also given a voice. Additional work performed by this piece, it seems to me, is to be found in the intermingling of these two form of sonic intimacy—the personal and the environmental—and the way that they prompt reflection on mediation, place, urban life, others, and intimacy. That is to say that, beyond its particular sonic portrait of Humboldt Park, Saturday works in “clearing some conceptual space” in the mind of the departing gallery visitor such that they might “listen for, if not precisely to, the collective, polyphonic ‘voice of the world’” (Pettman 6) as they go about their day-to-day lives.Lukatoyboy, Walk That Sound (2014)The second project, Walk That Sound, by Serbian sound artist Lukatoyboy was completed for the 2014 CTM festival. CTM is an annual festival event that is staged in Berlin and dedicated to “adventurous music and art” (CTM Festival, “About”). A key project within the festival is CTM Radio Lab. The Lab supports works, commissioned by CTM Festival and Deutschlandradio Kultur – Hörspiel/Klangkunst (among other partnering organisations), that seek to pair and explore the “specific artistic possibilities of radio with the potentials of live performance or installation” (CTM Festival, “Projects”). Lukatoyboy’s Walk That Sound was one of two commissioned pieces for the 2014 CTM Radio Lab. The project used the “commonplace yet often forgotten walkie-talkie” (CTM Festival, “Projects”) to create a moving urban sound portrait in the area around the Kottbusser Tor U-Bahn station in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Walk That Sound recruited participants—“mobile scouts”—to rove around the Kottbusser Tor area (CTM Festival, “Projects”). Armed with walkie-talkies, and playing with “the array of available and free frequencies, and the almost unlimited amount of users that can interact over these different channels”, the project captured the dispatches via walkie-talkie of each participant (CTM Festival, “Projects”). The resultant recording of Walk That Sound—which was aired on Deutschlandradio (see Lukatoyboy), part of a long tradition of transmitting experimental music and sound art on German radio (Cory)—forms an eclectic soundscape.The work juxtaposes snippets of dialogue shared between the mobile scouts, overheard mobile phone conversations, and moments of relative quietude, where the subdued soundtrack is formed by the ambient sounds—the “voice”—of the Kottbusser Tor area. This voice includes distant traffic, the distinctive auditory ticking of pedestrian lights, and moments of tumult and agitation, such as the sounds of construction work, car horns, emergency services vehicle sirens, a bottle bouncing on the pavement, and various other repetitive yet difficult to identify industrial sounds. This voice trails off towards the end of the recording into extended walkie-talkie produced static or squelch. The topics covered within the “crackling dialogues” (CTM Festival, “Projects”) of the mobile scouts ranged widely. There were banal observations (“I just stepped on a used tissue” “people are crossing the street” “there are 150 trains”)—wonderings that bear strong similarities with French writer Georges Perec’s well-known experimental descriptions of everyday Parisian life in the 1970s (Perec “An Attempt”). There were also intimate, confiding, flirtatious remarks (“Do you want to come to Turkey with me?”), as well as a number of playfully paranoid observations and quips (“I like to lie” “I can see you” “do you feel like you are being recorded?” “I’m being followed”) that seem to speak to the fraught history of Berlin in particular as well as the complicated character of urban life in general—as Pettman asks, “what does ‘together’ signify in a socioeconomic system so efficient in producing alienation and isolation?” (92).In sum, Walk That Sound is a strangely moving exploration of sonic intimacy, one that shifts between many different registers and points of focus—much like urban wandering itself. As a work, it is variously funny, smart, paranoid, intimate, expansive, difficult to decipher, and, at times, even difficult to listen to. Pettman argues that, “thanks in large part to the industrialization of the human ear […], we have lost the capacity to hear the vox mundi, which is […] the sum total of cacophonous, heterogeneous, incommensurate, and unsynthesizable sounds of the postnatural world” (8). Walk That Sound functions almost like a response to this dilemma. One comes away from listening to it with a heightened awareness of, appreciation for, and aural connection to the rich messiness of the polyphonic contemporary urban vox mundi. ConclusionThe argument of this article is that Sabrina Raaf’s Saturday and Lukatoyboy’s Walk That Sound are two projects that both incorporate walkie-talkies in order to develop mediated forms of wandering that seek to capture place-based sonic ambiances and sonic intimacies. Drawing on Pettman’s notion of “sonic intimacy”, examination of these projects has opened consideration around voice, analogue technology, and what Nick Couldry refers to as “an obligation to listen” (Couldry 580). In order to be heard, Pettman remarks, and “in order to be considered a voice at all”, and therefore as “something worth heeding”, the vox mundi “must arrive intimately, or else it is experienced as noise or static” (Pettman 83). In both the projects discussed here—Saturday and Walk That Sound—the walkie-talkie provides this means of “intimate arrival”. As half-duplex communication devices, walkie-talkies have always fulfilled a double function: communicating and listening. This dual functionality is exploited in new ways by Raaf and Lukatoyboy. In their projects, both artists turn the microphone outwards, such that the walkie-talkie becomes not just a device for communicating while in the field, but also—and more strikingly—it becomes a field recording device. The result of which is that this simple, “playful” communication device is utilised in these two projects in two ways: on the one hand, as a “carrier of potentially enlightening alterity” (Pettman 83), a means of encouraging “potential encounters” (89) with strangers who have been thrown together and who cross paths, and, on the other hand, as a means of fostering “an environmental awareness” (89) of the world around us. In developing these prompts, Raaf and Lukatoyboy build potential bridges between Pettman’s work on sonic intimacy, their own work, and the work of other experimental artists. For instance, in relation to potential encounters, there are clear points of connection with Blast Theory, a group who, as noted earlier, have utilised walkie-talkies and sound-based and other media technologies to explore issues around urban encounters with strangers that promote reflection on ideas and experiences of otherness and difference (see Wilken)—issues that are also implicit in the two works examined. In relation to environmental awareness, their work—as well as Pettman’s calls for greater sonic intimacy—brings renewed urgency to Georges Perec’s encouragement to “question the habitual” and to account for, and listen carefully to, “the common, the ordinary, the infraordinary, the background noise” (Perec “Approaches” 210).Walkie-talkies, for Raaf and Lukatoyboy, when reimagined as field recording devices as much as remote transmission technologies, thus “allow new forms of listening, which in turn afford new forms of being together” (Pettman 92), new forms of being in the world, and new forms of sonic intimacy. Both these artworks engage with, and explore, what’s at stake in a politics and ethics of listening. Pettman prompts us, as urban dweller-wanderers, to think about how we might “attend to the act of listening itself, rather than to a specific sound” (Pettman 1). His questioning, as this article has explored, is answered by the works from Raaf and Lukatoyboy in effective style and technique, setting up opportunities for aural attentiveness and experiential learning. However, it is up to us whether we are prepared to listen carefully and to open ourselves to such intimate sonic contact with others and with the environments in which we live.ReferencesAnon. “Die Welt als Labyrinth.” Internationale Situationiste 4 (Jan. 1960). International Situationist Online, 19 June 2019 ionline/si/diewelt.html Blast Theory. “Can You See Me Now?” Blast Theory, 19 June 2019 www.blasttheory.co.uk rojects/can-you-see-me-now/ .———. “You Get Me.” Blast Theory, 19 June 2019 wwww.blasttheory.co.uk rojects/you-get-me/ .Cory, Mark E. “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art.” Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-garde. Eds. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1992. 331–371.Couldry, Nick. “Rethinking the Politics of Voice.” Continuum 23.4 (2009): 579–582.CTM Festival. “About.” CTM Festival, 2019. 19 June 2019 www.ctm-festival.de/about/ctm-festival/ .———. “Projects – CTM Radio Lab.” CTM Festival, 2019. 19 June 2019 www.ctm-festival.de rojects/ctm-radio-lab/ .Duclos, Rebecca. “Reconnaissance/Méconnaissance: The Work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.” Articulate Objects: Voice, Sculpture and Performance. Eds. Aura Satz and Jon Wood. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. 221–246. Gallagher, Michael, and Jonathan Prior. “Sonic Geographies: Exploring Phonographic Methods.” Progress in Human Geography 38.2 (2014): 267–284.James, Malcom. Sonic Intimacy: The Study of Sound. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming.Lefebvre, Henri, and Kristin Ross. “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview.” October 79 (Winter 1997): 69–83. Leorke, Dale. Location-Based Gaming: Play in Public Space. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.Lukatoyboy. “Walk That Sound – Deutschlandradiokultur Klangkunst Broadcast 14.02.2014.” SoundCloud. 19 June 2019 ukatoyboy/walk-that-sound-deutschlandradiokultur-broadcast-14022014 .“Nextel: Couple. Walkie Talkies Are Good for Something More.” AdAge. 6 June 2012. 18 July 2019 reativity/work/couple/27993 .Perec, Georges. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Trans. Marc Lowenthal. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2010.———. “Approaches to What?” Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Rev. ed. Ed. and trans. John Sturrock. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1999. 209–211.Pettman, Dominic. Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (Or, How to Listen to the World). 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Wikipedia, 3 July 2019. 18 July 2019 iki/Walkie-talkie .Wilken, Rowan. “Proximity and Alienation: Narratives of City, Self, and Other in the Locative Games of Blast Theory.” The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies. Ed. Jason Farman. New York: Routledge, 2014. 175–191.

Strategic Regionalization in Marketing Campaigns: Beyond the Standardization/Glocalization Debate

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 04-2009

DOI: 10.1080/10304310802710496

Everyday data cultures and USB portable flash drives

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 19-10-2022

DOI: 10.1177/13678779211047917

Abstract: In this article, we present a deeper understanding of everyday data cultures in regards to personal information management practices. We draw on a study involving 14 in-depth interviews with users of portable hard drives and USB portable flash drives in Melbourne, Australia, to examine participants’ reflections on their management of personal information on USB portable devices. In examining participant use of these devices, we consider how they kept (stored) and organized (arranged) information on these devices. We also examined device and data sharing. We conclude by thinking about their increased use within cross-tool information management, including the nexus of portable hard drive/USB use and cloud storage. The argument of this article is that portable hard drives and USBs, due to their miniaturization, ease of portability, affordability and storage capacity, add considerable complexity to established understandings of personal information management practices.

Mobile Technology and Place

Publisher: Routledge

Date: 07-05-2013

DOI: 10.4324/9780203127551

Mobilizing Place: Mobile Media, Peripatetics, and the Renegotiation of Urban Places

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 12-2008

DOI: 10.1080/10630730802677939

Foundations of Mobile Media Studies

Publisher: Routledge

Date: 19-11-2015

DOI: 10.4324/9781315646664

Social Shaping of Mobile Geomedia Services: An Analysis of Yelp and Foursquare

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 06-2019

DOI: 10.1177/2057047319850200

Abstract: In their book, Location-Based Social Media: Space, Time and Identity, Leighton Evans and Michael Saker remark on the apparent ‘death’ of location-based social networks, suggesting that location-based social networks can now be understood as ‘a form of “zombie-media” that animates and haunts other media platforms’. In this article, we use this perspective as a point of departure for a social shaping of technology-informed analysis of two key geomedia platforms: Yelp and Foursquare. With Yelp approaching its 15th year of service and Foursquare approaching its 10th anniversary, this article provides a timely opportunity to (re-)examine the significance of Yelp and Foursquare and the many reconfigurations both firms have made to their services since their launch. These include, most recently, Yelp’s integration of artificial intelligence/machine learning techniques to parse, sift and order users’ posts and Foursquare’s development of its Pilgrim SDK (software design kit) to power the location services of other platforms, like Tinder and Snap. A social shaping-inflected approach is productive in this context in that it stresses how many of these developments and strategic reorientations are not just in response to shareholder and investor pressures, they are also fundamentally shaped by and made in response to the fluctuating demands of end-users within a complicated, competitive and continuously evolving geomedia ecosystem. Consequently, we draw from the work of Leah A Lievrouw to examine how dual tensions of contingency/determination shape how these applications are designed and used, and how both design and use continue to evolve in response to various external pressures.

Digital literacies and the national broadband network: Competency, legibility, context

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 05-2013

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X1314700104

Abstract: This article reports on findings from an ethnographic study of fifteen participant households in North Hobart and Midway Point, Tasmania. Key themes emerging from this research have been gathered and presented here through the metaphor ‘digital literacy’. The first half of the article is concerned with developing a critical understanding of what is at stake in the notion, or metaphor, of digital literacy. The second half tests these understandings against our research. In our conversations with the people of North Hobart and Midway Point, we found evidence of digital illiteracy, and also evidence of the weaknesses of digital literacy as an explanatory trope. We group these findings using three themes: (1) the presence of instrumental literacy (2) the illegibility of the NBN and its HSB services and (3) structural conditions limiting the acquisition of the NBN and its HSB services. These three draw upon the digital literacy metaphor, but make its shortcomings clear, and the latter two in particular extend the metaphor from a personal deficit model to one that embraces technologies and social structures.

Mobile Media and Ecologies of Location

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 02-01-2015

DOI: 10.1080/22041451.2015.1042423

An Exploratory Comparative Analysis of the Use of Metaphors in Writing on the Internet and Mobile Phones

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 11-2013

DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2012.738999

Peter Carey’s Laptop

Publisher: University of Technology, Sydney (UTS)

Date: 19-03-2014

DOI: 10.5130/CSR.V20I1.3835

Abstract: In 2001, the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne built on its holdings of Australian literary manuscripts by acquiring all the papers, drafts and other items associated with Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel, True History of the Kelly Gang. The centrepiece of this acquisition, and the focus of this article, is Carey’s Apple Mac Classic laptop computer. The argument that is developed in this article is that Carey’s laptop is a technological artefact that operates, especially at the time of its acquisition, as an important talisman in three interrelated senses. First, it was viewed by library staff as a key means of gaining access to the ‘true history’ of Carey’s own creative drive or creative unconscious. Second, its public display alongside other textual objects (mostly books) served to reinforce a reconstructed corporate image that endeavoured to reposition the library as a vital contemporary cultural site and key player in Melbourne’s institutional gallery scene. Third, it was a crucial symbolic acquisition insofar as it spoke to certain desires within library management at that time, and which responded to similar moves at major libraries elsewhere around the world, to embrace collection digitisation as the path forward.

Digital housekeepers and domestic expertise in the networked home

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 24-04-2015

DOI: 10.1177/1354856515579848

Abstract: This article examines the distribution of expertise in the performance of ‘digital housekeeping’ required to maintain a networked home. It considers the labours required to maintain a networked home, the forms of digital expertise that are available and valued in digital housekeeping, and ways in which expertise is gendered in distribution amongst household members. As part of this discussion, we consider how digital housekeeping implicitly situates technology work within the home in the role of the ‘housekeeper’, a term that is complicated by gendered sensitivities. Digital housework, like other forms of domestic labour, contributes to identity and self-worth. The concept of housework also affords visibility of the digital housekeeper’s enrolment in the project of maintaining the household. This article therefore asks, what is at stake in the gendered distribution of digital housekeeping?

Broadband in the home pilot study: Suburban Hobart

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology

Date: 27-02-2011

DOI: 10.7790/TJA.V61I1.180

COVID-19, 5G conspiracies and infrastructural futures

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 27-08-2020

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X20952165

Abstract: This article examines the emergence of conspiracy theories linking COVID-19 with 5G, with a focus on Australia, the United States and United Kingdom. The article is in two parts. The first details long-standing concerns around mobile technologies and infrastructures before showing how they translate to specific worries about 5G technology. The second shows how these fears have fuelled specific conspiracies connecting 5G with COVID-19, how they have animated protests and acts of vandalism that have occurred during the pandemic, and the ongoing engagement of conspiracists with official inquiries into 5G. Finally, we argue that a productive way to understand what is happening with 5G is to look beyond conspiracy theories to a larger set of concerns. We argue that the battle for control of 5G infrastructure can be productively understood in geopolitical terms, as forms of economic statecraft, which partly explains why governments are increasingly concerned about countering misinformation and disinformation around 5G.

Communication Infrastructures and the Contest Over Location-Positioning

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 03-07-2019

DOI: 10.1177/2050157919847503

Abstract: This article builds on renewed critical awareness of the significance of, and need to understand, the material infrastructures that underpin and, importantly, also sustain mobile communication. The focus of this article is on the fluctuating fortunes of one U.S. company: Skyhook Wireless. The company was founded in 2003 with the explicit aim of exploring and developing systems that responded to a very specific communication infrastructure related challenge: how to calculate location positioning from Wi-Fi signals rather than from cellular towers or by using GPS? In this article, I detail the technical means by which they achieved this, and examine how the strength of Skyhook’s position in the field of location positioning and analysis became a key factor driving Google’s highly contentious Street View program for extracting and recording Wi-Fi access point and payload data. Through this analysis of Skyhook Wireless and its technical achievements, this article aims to contribute valuable new knowledge to our understanding of the location-related operations of mobile devices the infrastructures associated with these operations and the businesses that have emerged around, draw on, contribute to, and have come to dominate, these infrastructural systems.

The cultural economy of TiVo in Australia

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology

Date: 15-11-2011

DOI: 10.7790/TJA.V61I4.252

Proxy users, use by proxy: Mapping forms of intermediary interaction

Publisher: ACM

Date: 07-12-2015

DOI: 10.1145/2838739.2838789

A Community of Strangers? Mobile Media, Art, Tactility, and Urban Encounters with the Other

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 11-2010

DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2010.510330

Studying mobile media: Cultural technologies, mobile communication, and the iPhone

Publisher: Routledge

Date: 23-04-2012

DOI: 10.4324/9780203127711

Global Marketing Communications and Strategic Regionalism

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 02-2011

DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2011.544189

Sensors as media and sensor-mediated communication: an introduction to the special issue

Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)

Date: 04-08-2023

DOI: 10.1093/JCMC/ZMAD033

Abstract: This special issue examines mediated communication through the rise of sensors. Sensors are increasingly in the phones we carry, in the cars we drive, and throughout the homes and communities in which we live. In this introduction to the special issue, we define sensor-mediated communication (SMC) and argue the embedded, automatic, and datafied nature of sensors belie the glitches and biases in sensor mechanisms, networks, and infrastructure. The collection of articles in this issue explores SMC across a variety of contexts and cases, including municipal infrastructure, community, health, industry, and the domestic. They represent studies of voice assistants, self-tracking apps, self-driving cars, fitness games, home health care, as well as municipal sensor networks in urban, indigenous, and rural communities. Across them all we see the different ways through which mediated communication is initiated, transformed, and maintained by sensing technologies. Together they represent an important evolution in the study of computer-mediated communication.

The rise and fall of MapQuest

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 04-2022

DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2022.2057752

Asynchronous speeds: Disentangling the discourse of 'high-speed broadband' in relation to Australia's National Broadband Network

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 05-2014

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X1415100116

Abstract: This article analyses the substantive problems related to the term ‘high-speed broadband’ in relation to the implementation of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). It argues that an understanding of speed in relation to broadband must take into account a complex assemblage of infrastructure networks, communication devices, software, location, user subjectivity and political input. Within this assemblage are varied definitions, discourses and materialities of speed that do not necessarily synchronise. Instead, speed is subject to asynchronous perceptions and implementations, which impact on the potential of the NBN. With the aim of contextualising and problematising the understanding of speed in relation to the NBN, this article explores four key points: first, how the perception of speed is dependent not so much on technical performance, but on the subjectivities of internet experience second, how the term ‘broadband’ is politically shaped, especially in the context of the Coalition government's alternative multi-technology mix plan third, how the assemblage of different social, technical and political actants that constitute high-speed broadband determines the perception of speed and finally, how asynchronous speeds of broadband implementation and adoption may impact on the potential benefits of the NBN.

Rethinking “Big Data” as Visual Knowledge: The Sublime and the Diagrammatic in Data Visualisation

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 07-04-2014

DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2014.887268

Placemaking through mobile social media platform Snapchat

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 16-02-2021

DOI: 10.1177/1354856521989518

Abstract: In this article, we examine the particular ways that place is configured in and through mobile social media platform Snapchat, and how Snapchat is designed and conceptualized in such a way as to encourage digital placemaking. The position we take in this article is that place is not a thing that is merely recorded through this platform. Rather, place is something that is continually enacted, negotiated and renegotiated across multiple levels of media engagement. In developing this position, we first review the previous research on Snapchat that relates to placemaking. Then, we examine placemaking through two primary lens: Snapchat’s design and Snapchat’s business model. Our argument is that close examination of the place-based materiality and meaning of the Snapchat service for itself and for its clients reveals the interconnected construction and commodification of place through this service.

Data cultures of mobile dating and hook-up apps: Emerging issues for critical social science research

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 25-07-2017

DOI: 10.1177/2053951717720950

Constructing the Check-in: Reflections on Photo-taking Among Foursquare Users

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 06-2019

DOI: 10.1177/2057047319853328

Abstract: In this article, we explore the social construction of geomedia in relation to mobile photo-taking. The article draws from a study of location-sensitive mobile social networking and search and recommendation service Foursquare in Melbourne and New York City. The study utilized photo elicitation techniques, with each participant asked to provide photographs they associated with their own Foursquare check-ins, accompanied by written responses to questions designed to encourage them to reflect upon their motivations for recording and uploading each image. What emerged from our analysis of how participants discussed the construction of their Foursquare check-ins, were certain consistencies with the findings of prior work on Foursquare (e.g. to register a new venue or a nice meal, as part of exercises in self-expression, and to record memory traces). Strikingly, though, we also noticed something subtly yet significantly different in relation to photo use. Many of the submitted images and accompanying explanations revealed a particular sensitivity toward the local and the familiar, and a desire to capture “a mood, a feeling”—an “ordinary affect.” In light of this, in this article we are interested in the tension that exists between designed or intended uses of Foursquare, the social appropriation and shaping that is undertaken by Foursquare’s end-users, and the technological and strategic business adjustments that are undertaken by Foursquare in response.

The Critical Reception of Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Writings on Heidegger and Place

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 12-2013

DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2013.875614

Platform Specificity and the Politics of Location Data Extraction

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 16-06-2015

DOI: 10.1177/1367549415577386

Abstract: The rise of smart phone use, and its convergence with mapping infrastructures and large search and social media corporations, has led to a commensurate rise in the importance of location. While locations are still defined by fixed longitude/latitude coordinates, they now increasingly ‘acquire dynamic meaning as a consequence of the constantly changing location-based information that is attached to them’ becoming ‘a near universal search string for the world’s data’. As the richness of this geocoded information increases, so the commercial value of this location information also increases. This article examines the growing commercial significance of location data. Informed by recent calls for ‘medium-specific analysis’, we build on earlier work to argue that social media companies actively extract location data for commercial advantage in quite specific ways. By not paying due and careful attention to the specifics of data extraction strategies, political and cultural economic analyses of new media services risk eliding key differences between new media platforms, and their respective software systems, patterns of consumer use, and in idual revenue models. In response, we develop a comparative analysis of two platforms – Foursquare and Google – and examine how each extracts and uses geocoded user data. From this comparative exploration of platform specificity, we aim to draw conclusions concerning marketing (economic) surveillance, and how Foursquare’s and Google’s operations work in the service of fostering the securitization of mobility - the process by which the capacity to track and predict mobility and associated patterns of consumption is directly productive of value.

Methodological and ethical concerns associated with digital ethnography in domestic environments: Participant burden and burdensome technologies

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US

Date: 2016

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-54305-9_4

The Haunting Affect of Place in the Discourse of the Virtual

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 03-2007

DOI: 10.1080/13668790601150545

The Australian Government Internet Filter: Its Scope, and Its Potential Civil Liberties Implications

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology

Date: 21-05-2012

DOI: 10.7790/TJA.V62I2.308

Introduction: Telecommunications revolution? Enduring problems and possible futures

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 18-09-2023

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X231202271

RMIT University

Location: Australia

View Organisation

Discovery Projects - Grant ID: DP130101519

Start Date: 05-2013

End Date: 12-2017

Amount: $208,000.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Discovery Projects - Grant ID: DP210100386

Start Date: 10-2021

End Date: 12-2024

Amount: $166,987.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE120102114

Start Date: 02-2012

End Date: 01-2017

Amount: $375,000.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment And Facilities - Grant ID: LE140100148

Start Date: 06-2014

End Date: 12-2016

Amount: $460,000.00

Funder: Australian Research Council