Month: January 2016

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Reblog> Digital Interfaces, Credit and Debt – new project from @ash_ecotechnics & @BenAndersonGeog

Not really sure how I missed this announcement last week but there you go… An interesting new ESRC-funded project led by James Ash concerning the growth of personal/’pay day’ loans (“High Cost, Short-Term Credit”) that are accessed through mediation, such as an ‘app’. Kudos to James and team for landing this with success rates with the ESRC as low as they are – a great achievement.

I’m sure it’ll be a great project!

Digital Interfaces, Credit and Debt

I am happy to formally announce that I am primary investigator on an ESRCfunded project entitled: ‘Digital Interfaces and Debt: understanding mediated decision making processes in high cost short term credit products’ with co-investigators: Dr Ben Anderson and Dr Paul Langley. 

This 18 month project (2016-2018) seeks to understand how consumers access HCSTC (High Cost Short Term Credit), such as cash and pay day loans through digital interfaces, on personal computers and mobile devices and in turn how these interfaces shape decision making processes regarding the purchasing of credit. The project proposes a novel approach to debt as an everyday phenomenon that is mediated through the relationship between technology and embodied practice. Understanding how people become indebted through digital interfaces is critical to analyzing and explaining contemporary indebtedness because 82% of cash and pay day loans, a key form of HCSTC, are now applied for and managed via digital interfaces on laptops, tablets and smart phones (Competition and Markets Authority, 2015). Through original empirical investigation with designers and users of mobile interfaces, debt support charities and financial regulators, the research will generate new evidence about everyday experiences of debt and indebtedness and contributes to important societal and academic debates about emerging forms of credit and problematic forms of economic subjectivity.

The project begins later this year and will have its own dedicated website and Twitter account, which will be publicized in due course.

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Reblog> The Geopolitics of Context: Mordor, Russia and Google Translate, by @Pip__T

An interesting blogpost by Pip Thornton on the Royal Holloway Geopolotics & Security blog:

The Geopolitics of Context: Mordor, Russia and Google Translate

“One does not simply walk into the Russian Federation”

Over the last week several media outlets, and many more Twitter feeds, have been spreading news of a series of ‘glitches’ in Google Translate which saw the word Russia being synonymised with Mordor when translated from Ukrainian to Russian. Furthermore, Russians became occupiers and for a short time the name of the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov returned the result sad little horse. 

vk-russia-to-ukraine

Twitter / Vadim Nakhankov (wired.co.uk)

Noting that ‘the terms mirror language used by some Ukrainians following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014″², some suggested the possibility of foul play; that the algorithm was ‘hacked by spies‘, ‘jokers’ or ‘mischievous pro-Kiev activists’,  or that the words had been inserted manually by users as alternative translations presumably in order to ridicule Russia and humiliate Lavrov. Other sources referred to a ‘bug’ or an ‘automated error’ in the algorithm, an explanation seemingly substantiated by the way Google quickly issued an ‘embarrassed apology’, stepping in to ‘fix’ their wayward algorithms as soon as the matter came to light.

Read the full post here.

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Apps & affect – Fibreculture 25

This issue of Fibreculture on “apps and affect” from last year (2015), stemming from a conference of the same name,  has some fairly substantial looking contributions from interesting people. These include a conversation between Alexander Galloway & Patricia Ticineto Clough, the ‘algorithmic agartha‘ paper by Nandita Biswas Mellamphy & Dan Mellamphy I’ve linked to before and (of particular interest to me at the mo) a paper by Melissa Gregg on speculative labour & app development. It’s edited by Svitlana Matviyenko, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Alison Hearn, and Andrew Murphie.

Introduction

In William Gibson’s recent futurist novel The Peripheral, the planet has been devastated by a massive eco-techno-political catastrophe (‘the jackpot’) but remaining inhabitants are still able to enjoy the luxury of activating digital devices simply by tapping their tongues on the roof of their mouths. This touch is sufficient to set into play systems that communicate across space and time – enabling the establishment of connections back in time, for example, to people closer to our own present-day, for whom mobiles are still (somewhat) separate from the body. Thirty years ago, in his first novel Neuromancer, Gibson immortalised cyberspace with the account of what now sounds like an amazingly clunky process whereby the hero ‘jacks-in’ to virtual reality. But in The Peripheral the process of translation and transition into networks is streamlined – occluded, internal, intimate and implanted – right at the tip of the tongue.

This issue of the Fibreculture Journal explores a moment along this hypothetical trajectory by investigating the contemporary intersection of ‘Apps and Affect’, publishing papers from a conference of that name organised in October 2013 by faculty and students at Western University (specifically from its Faculty of Information and Media Studies and Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism). By recognising apps as objects that are related to the constitution of subjects, as a component of biopolitical assemblages, and as a means of digital production and consumption, our conference aimed to make an intervention in what had – since the announcements of the App-Store and the iPhone3 in 2008 – been a largely technical and rather technophiliac public discussion of apps.

Isn’t it paradoxical, we asked, that instead of becoming ‘transparent’ and ‘invisible’ – as envisioned by the thinkers of ubiquitous computing decades ago – the app-ecosystem manifests itself as permanent excess: excessive downloads, excessive connections, excessive proximity, excessive ‘friends’-qua-‘contacts’, excessive speeds and excessive amounts of information? How does the app as ‘technique’ (Tenner), indeed as ‘cultural technique’ (Siegert) and as ‘technics’ (Stiegler), channel our ways of maintaining relations with/in the media environment? Do the specific and circumscribed operations of individual applications foster or foreclose what media theorists call the transformative and transductive potential of collective technological individuation (Simondon)? How might we think about the social, political and technical implications of this movement away from open-ended networks like the internet towards specific, focused, and individualised modes of computing? Do apps represent ‘a new reticular condition of trans-individuation grammatising new forms of social relations’ (Stiegler) or do they signal instead the triumph of ‘regulatory’ networks over ‘generative’ ones (Zittrain)? If apps are micro-programs residing by the hundreds and thousands on cell-phones, mobile-devices and tablets, and affects are corporeal excitements (and depressions) running beneath and beyond cognition, what is the relation of apps to affects?

– See more at: http://twentyfive.fibreculturejournal.org/#sthash.6y9K3uyP.dpuf

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Sue Ruddick ~ reading & writing in a materialist way

There’s a free to access commentary on the Society and Space website by Sue Ruddick on reading and writing in a materialist way. i really enjoyed reading this and I recommend it…

Here’s a snippet:

…concepts matter.  They matter in their distinctions.  They make a difference, in the most literal sense that, in the act of philosophizing, in the invention, creation of a new concept, one is attempting to change sensibilities, provoke new perceptions and understandings, to make difference. This is why we must proceed with caution in attempts to make new or difficult concepts legible to a wider audience; we must be a careful not simply to appeal to a common sense understanding, lest we risk losing the very specificity of the concept in question. It is in this sense, I argue, that we cannot simply substitute a more commonly understood term for its less familiar concept. We cannot for example exchange “affect” for “emotion” (unless we want to launch a fully developed argument as to why they are equivalent) any more than we might substitute “price difference” for “surplus value”.  To paraphrase Deleuze, when a philosopher employs a distinctive term or concept, it is in principle because he or she has a reason to (Deleuze 1978).

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A summary of Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time 1 by Dan Ross

I’ve mentioned this here before but Dan Ross wrote an excellent and accessible summary or guide to Stiegler’s first and perhaps most extraordinary volume of the series at the heart of his project Technics and Time, which was the Wikipedia page for that book. Unfortunately this has been open to some questionable editing and so it is great that Dan has uploaded his version to Academia.edu as a free-to-access PDF. I recommend this as a support to a reading of T&T 1. Dan’s knowledge and interpretation of Steigler’s work is brilliant.

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Recommended: Cultural Geography Going Viral – provocation By @ProfGillian

Another interesting article out in the ‘Online Early’ section of Social & Cultural Geography is by Gillian Rose, from the “Provocations of the Present” OU event, way back in 2014(!).

Gillian gave an interesting talk on the day, which resonated with things I’ve written, and it’s interesting to read the ‘final’ version, entitled “Cultural Geography Going Viral“.

Using the example of Emily Thorberry’s injudicious tweet concerning white vans and the St George’s cross, Gillian explores how the techniques of analysis of such an image and how it is audienced, interpreted, circulated, and so on and, provocatively, discusses how “the skills of the cultural geographer are now widespread”:

In fact, they are probably no more widespread than they ever have been, but social media and online commentary is making them more visible than ever before. Everyone is reading cultural texts and coming to conclusions about their meaning and sharing their interpretations, it seems – and if they can’t understand what’s going on, they ask and they get an answer. Those answers unpack both the symbolism of specific cultural texts but also the production and circulation of those texts by specific forms of media institutions. In other words, cultural interpretation has gone viral.

This resonates in many ways with some of what I argue in my own ‘provocation‘, in which I argue that we (cultural geographers, and others) need to attend to the various ways on understanding mediation when discussing popular culture (and that we need to discuss popular culture more!)

Anyway, all this is simply to say that I recommend reading Prof. Rose’s article.

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Highly recommended: Theatrical magic and the agenda to enchant the world

Some great articles in the ‘Online Early’ section of Social & Cultural Geography (as Mary Gilmartin tweeted today) and one jewel amongst them is a great new paper from Charlie Rolfe on theatrical magic, ‘unreal experiments’ and the agenda to enchant the world.

Charlie gave an early version of this in what was a tour de force seminar at Exeter Geography and I highly recommend reading the article!

Here’s the abstract:

This paper addresses the agenda of enchantment as it relates to contemporary theatrical magic (those deliberately enigmatic activities that are performed, experienced and commercialized as a form of entertainment). Magic practice is regularly constructed along a particular teleology: ‘action → effect of impossibility → affect of astonishment’. The paper supplements this teleology in four sections. First, a discussion of magicians’ knowledge and the ignorance required for participant-spectators to apprehend effects of impossibility and become astonished. Second, an examination of two forms of reason: one, an investigation into hidden ‘secrets’; the other, a perception of superficial ‘effects’. Third, a critique of the figure of the magician and its disputed role within magic practice. Fourth, a presentation and discussion of three empirical vignettes – professional magician Jay Sankey’s ‘Unreal Experiments’ – which advocate an evental logic with an experimental ethos; thus, enacting a critique of the figure and teleological structure of practice, and posing a challenge to rethink and invitation to expand theatrical magic practice. In conclusion, the paper highlights some of the ways in which theatrical magic participates in the agenda to enchant the world that has so gripped social science.

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Reblog> Making space for writing: geography and research writing

This looks interesting and pertinent to the rash of writing-related blogging by Stuart Elden and others in the last couple of years…

Making space for writing: geography and research writing

RGS-IBG ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2016
Royal Geographical Society, London

30th August – 3rd September 2016

Call for Papers

Making space for writing: geography and research writing

Sponsored by the Higher Education Research Group of the RGS-IBG

Session Organisers: Rae Dufty-Jones (Western Sydney University) and Chris Gibson (University of Wollongong)

Writing is integral to how we perform our scholarly identities as geographers. As Kamler and Thompson (2006: 15) argue: ‘we are represented by our writings and we are judged by them’. Research writing is a key product by which colleagues and institutions evaluate our past and potential contributions. It is often the source of much personal anxiety. To be able to write about their research is also a key skill that graduate students are often expected to have mastered by the time they complete their doctoral studies.

Yet, while we regularly espouse the need to ‘find space’ for our writing, we have seldom overtly theorised space in our writing practices. Writing remains a ‘black box’ in geographical literatures.

This session invites proposals to present work examining the nexus between geography, geographers and research writing. Some suggested questions for framing papers include:

  • What role does ‘space’ play in our writing practices?
  • What strategies are employed by geographers to make ‘space’ (figurative, literal, relational) for our research writing?
  • What does the advent of the neoliberal university mean for academic writing practice?
  • How have geographers challenged or resisted managerial expectations around their writing practices and products?
  • How might geographers contribute theoretically/conceptually to understandings of research writing both generally, and pedagogically?
  • What approaches do geographers use in teaching graduate students how to write, and how might these approaches be improved, especially through a focus on ‘making space’ for writing?
  • Reflections on graduate student experiences of being taught how to write their research – the good, the bad and the ugly.

Please email proposals (title + 200-250 word Abstract) or queries to Rae Dufty-Jones (r.dufty-jones@western.edu.au) and Chris Gibson (cgibson@uow.edu.au).  The deadline for Abstracts is Friday 5th February 2016.  The format of the session will be the presentation of 4-5 selected papers each lasting 20 minutes.

Reference
Kamler B and Thomson P. (2006) Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision, London: Routledge.