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FCJManager

FCJManager has written 6 posts for The Fibreculture Journal : 23
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FCJ-172 Posthumanism, Technogenesis, and Digital Technologies: A Conversation with N. Katherine Hayles

By ⋅ December 15, 2014 ⋅ Post a comment

Holger Pötzsch UiT Tromsø N. Katherine Hayles Duke University Holger Pötzsch: Katherine Hayles, your idea of posthumanism is inspired by cybernetics and by a new attentiveness to the body and materiality? N. Katherine Hayles: Posthumanism as I define it in my book How We Became Posthuman (1999) was in part about the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject and the attributes normally associated with it such as autonomy, free will, self determination and so forth. What I saw happening in the 1980s and 1990s was the rise of a new way of thinking about human beings that was in flat contradiction to all these attributes; that was what I called posthumanism. One of its manifestations was the idea that if you capture the informational patterns of the human brain, you could then upload it to a computer and achieve effective immortality. To me this seemed absolutely wrong, even pernicious, because […]

FCJ-171 Expectations denied: Fan and industry conflict around the localisation of the Japanese video game Yakuza 3

By ⋅ December 15, 2014 ⋅ Post a comment

Craig Norris University of Tasmania Introduction As various scholars (Jenkins, 2006a; Ito, 2007; Gray, 2010) have shown, fans can derive creative and emotional pleasure out of the ‘world building’ occurring in complex media franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean (Jenkins, 2007), and Star Wars (Brooker, 2002). Media industries are also increasingly valuing the contributions fans are making to these large media franchises. As Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins (2009: 213) have pointed out, ‘fans have been redefined as the drivers of wealth production within the new digital economy: their engagement and participation is actively being pursued.’ As this research has shown, although audiences engage deeply and passionately with these large fictional worlds there is a growing expectation among fans that they will have some freedom to use and access this content in a way which best suits them. Within this context, online fan cultures have provided researchers with a ‘consistently […]

FCJ-170 Challenging Hate Speech With Facebook Flarf: The Role of User Practices in Regulating Hate Speech on Facebook

By ⋅ December 7, 2014 ⋅ Post a comment

Benjamin Abraham University of Western Sydney Introduction A recent spate of high profile cases of online abuse has raised awareness of the amount, volume and regularity of abuse and hate speech that women and minorities routinely attract online. These range from the responses garnered by Anita Sarkeesian’s (2012; 2014) video series ‘Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,’ which included photoshopped images of Sarkeesian made to appear bruised and brutalised, (Lewis, 2012) to the abuse directed at the activist Caroline Criado-Perez following her campaign to have a woman represented on a UK banknote (Guardian Staff, 2014), to the countless instances of more pernicious ‘Everyday Sexism’ documented by the activist group of the same name. As a result of these and a host of similar recent events, it has become increasingly apparent that online abuse and instances of hate speech directed at women, people of colour, transgender individuals and other minorities is […]

FCJ-169 Mapping Moving-Image Culture: Topographical Interface and YouTube

By ⋅ December 7, 2014 ⋅ One comment

Stephen Monteiro The American University of Paris Navigation and mobility are defining characteristics of the contemporary media experience. Unlike the rigid, easily learned parameters of earlier media forms, global digital networks offer increasingly complex and constantly changing exchanges, formations, and compilations of information. Through a combination of hardware design and integrated software a range of devices including smartphones, tablets, and netbooks are as much navigational instruments as they are communicative tools (Verhoeff, 2012; Farman, 2011). These devices and their effects are meant to get us places, whether objectively through geo-positioning and locative technologies or subjectively through operations and platforms that retrieve, analyse, and display data in response to our commands and presumed goals. In theorizing interfaces, Alexander Galloway points to effects as their critical component. ‘Interfaces are not simply objects or boundary points. They are autonomous zones of activity. Interfaces are not things, but rather processes that effect a result […]

FCJ-168 Do objects dream of an internet of things?

By ⋅ December 4, 2014 ⋅ Post a comment

Teodor Mitew University of Wollongong Heteroclite I: Hermes, a walking statue In a fragment of a comedy by Plato Comicus, a statue of Hermes stumbles onstage and must answer the skeptic’s question: ‘Who are you? Tell me at once. Why are you silent? Won’t you speak?’ To which the statue replies, ‘I am Hermes, with a voice of Daedalus, made of wood, but I came here by walking on my own’. (Daston, 2004: 39) I may speak with the voice of my maker, but I came here on my own. I may be enunciating the agency of another, but have agency of my own too. In the Greek view of being, possessing a spirit was synonymous with having a voice, and therefore entities that appeared to be superficially inanimate yet had a voice signaled a transgression of the rules of occupancy, a deviation from the parameters of being, a heteroclite. […]

Issue 23: General Issue

By ⋅ December 3, 2014 ⋅ Post a comment

Imagine there’s no audit. It might be easy if we try. Are audit culture and performance management suffocating research in the humanities, rather than energising it? Are they pushing the work of publication toward an emphasis on pressured writing, ranking, measuring citations and h-indexes and so on? Does anyone actually read the work of others anymore, or are they just too busy publishing their own more immediate thoughts in order not to perish. Is publishing an encouragement to think, or to engagement with the community of scholars and beyond, or it is just a matter of scoring points for interested parties? Does audit work against inventiveness in publishing? Does it especially work against open access and online publishing? Does audit, ironically, take the “communication” and even sometimes the “scholarly” out of scholarly communication? Is research audit dehumanising research in the humanities? More people I talk to these days seem to […]