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

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 […]