A Digital Janus: Looking Forward, Looking Back
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
A Digital Janus: Looking Forward, Looking Back Item Type Book Authors Moser, Dennis; Dun, Susan Publisher Inter-Disciplinary Press Download date 06/10/2021 02:37:47 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/11122/5300 A Digital Janus Critical Issues Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Advisory Board Karl Spracklen Simon Bacon Katarzyna Bronk Stephen Morris Jo Chipperfield John Parry Ann-Marie Cook Ana Borlescu Peter Mario Kreuter Peter Twohig S Ram Vemuri Kenneth Wilson John Hochheimer A Critical Issues research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ The Cyber Hub ‘Cybercultures: Exploring Critical Issues’ 2014 A Digital Janus: Looking Forward, Looking Back Edited by Dennis Moser and Susan Dun Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom © Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087 ISBN: 978-1-84888-305-5 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2014. First Edition. Table of Contents Introduction A Digital Janus: Looking Forward, Looking Back ix Dennis Moser Part 1: Community, Memory, History, Art and Culture in Cyberspace Section 1.1 Theories and Concepts of Cyberspace and Cyberculture The Virtual Leash: Connected at Every Intersection Teigan Kollosche 5 The Digital Lives of the Dead: YouTube as a Practice of Cybermourning 15 Margaret Gibson and Marga Altena Section 1.2 Cyber-Subcultures The Arpeggio of Fragmentation: Music Bricolage in the Tracker Scene 31 Alberto José Viralhadas Ferreira 24 People Do Not Like the Horse Dance: YouTube as Community? 43 Kyong James Cho Section 1.3 Digital Memories: Concepts in Digitising Individual and Community Memory Virtual Communities and Identity Reconfiguration 55 Elena-Alis Costescu Section 1.4 Digital Memories: History and (Digital) Memory ‘Memories Are Just Dead Men Makin’ Trouble’: Digital Objects, Digital Memory, Digital History 67 Dennis Moser Encoding through Digital Memory and Our Remembrances 77 Segah Sak The Member’s a Virtual Gentleman 87 Patrick McEntaggart and Paul Wilson Section 1.5 Digital Memories: Cyber-Archaeology HyperScreens: The Presentation of Audiovisual Cultural Heritage through Interactive Media Platforms 99 Asen O. Ivanov Section 1.6 New Designs, Platforms and Art Practices Interface: The Actual Story 111 Funda Şenova Tunalı The Virtualisation of Architecture in the Digital Era 119 Vassilis Papalexopoulos and Artemis Psaltoglou Part 2 Places, Spaces, Politics, Society and Cyberculture Section 2.1 Emerging Practices in Social Networking Still a Long Way to Go: Media Branding in Social Network Sites 135 Sabine Baumann and Ulrike Rohn From Trolling for Newbs to Trolling for Cheezburger: An Analysis of the Transformation of Trolling 153 Catherine van Reenen Crowdfunded Film Campaigns: Drivers of Success 165 Jake Hobbs Section 2.2 Data Analysis Big Data and Governance 185 Maude Bonenfant, Marc Ménard, André Mondoux and Maxime Ouellet Section 2.3 Cyber-Policy and Cyber-Democracy and Their Impact on National and Global Politics Is Political Participation Online Effective? A Case Study of the Brazilian Federal Chamber of Representatives’ E-Democracy Initiative 199 Patrícia Gonçalves C. Rossini The Apparatus of Mobility and the Restriction from Cyberspace 209 Harris Breslow and Ilhem Allagui Cyber-Popular Pressure Can Improve Society 221 Miquel Rubio Domínguez Section 2.4 Narrative Architectures Filthy Lucre and Test Audiences: Fan Debates about Publishing Fan Fiction 231 Jennifer Roth and Monica Flegel Digital Literacy in Arabic Speakers: The Role of Bilingualism in Effective Use of Web Resources 243 Susan Dun and Dina Mutassem Section 2.5 New Media Literacies New Media Documentary: Playing with Documentary Film within the Database Logic and Culture 255 Ersan Ocak Visit(s) to the Museum: Visitors and Official Information Available on the Web 263 Olga Cristina Sousa and Abílio Oliveira Introduction A Digital Janus: Looking Forward, Looking Back Dennis Moser With each year, cyberculture and cyberspace become an increasingly integrated part of our realities. Their digital technologies have come to underpin many aspects of our lives, and ever more importantly, our history and our future. This is of concern to us as it has begun, and will increasingly continue, to exert considerable influence upon the institutions and structure of our societies, including those that define our future concepts of art and aesthetics, of our social interactions, of societal and individual remembrance, even how we will govern and be governed. As scholars and critics observing these changes, we seek out opportunities to discuss how to understand them, to ask questions about them, and to share our research about them. And these phenomena have been around long enough, and we have been discussing them long enough now, that an historical record has begun to emerge around the discussions and the phenomena themselves. But even at this stage of our existence, memory is itself imperfectly understood and history, too, is the subject of its own long-standing discussions. When our embrace of technology suggests that we can save ‘everything’ and that human memory can be enhanced, if not supplanted, by the use of that technology, then we must look carefully and try to understand what the implications are. To remember everything, indeed, to SAVE everything – is it a blessing or a curse? Is the ‘perfect’ memory of the history of armed conflict a desirable thing, if the breaches within the society so affected are to heal? Is the promise of digital ‘immortality’ possible, and if so, is it even desirable? When do we cease our time of mourning, if the dead are memorialised in digital perpetuity? And we must also consider the impact of cyberculture’s ubiquity – its reach raises questions of our concepts of being and aloneness. How can we experience solitude if we are all connected? Is the natural state of being soon to be ‘always on, always connected?’ These are but a few of the questions and considerations that presenters and attendees addressed at the 8th Global Conference, Cybercultures – Exploring Critical Issues, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in May, 2013. The conference also included a number of papers previously selected for the previously scheduled, but cancelled, 5th Global Conference, Digital Memories, that was to have been held earlier in the year. While that conference’s cancellation was unfortunate, the inclusion of a number of the scheduled papers fortunately made for a broader range than might previously have been possible. What follows, then, are the selected papers that effectively represented both conferences and present the even broader intellectual range covered. The book has been arranged into two parts along lines of intellectual focus that reveal the inter-connectedness within the conference. Part 1 entitled ‘Community, x Introduction __________________________________________________________________ Memory, History, Art and Culture in Cyberspace,’ comprises eleven chapters and consists of six subsections: 1. Theories and Concepts of Cyberspace and Cyberculture 2. Cyber-Subcultures 3. Digital Memories: Concepts in Digitising Individual and Community Memory 4. Digital Memories: History and (Digital) Memory 5. Digital Memories: Cyber-Archaeology 6. New Designs, Platforms and Art Practices Part 1 examines the relations that continue to develop between those who collect, create, curate, care for, and provide access to the manifestations of memory and history in our cultures today and the evolving digital technologies that offer new ways of working with the sources of that history and memory. It also explores what we are learning about memory and history, as the digital technologies of cyberculture give us the ability to capture events, seemingly in perpetuity. We begin with a subsection entitled ‘Theories and Concepts of Cyberspace and Cyberculture.’ In her chapter, ‘The Virtual Leash: Connected at Every Intersection’ Teigan Kollosche considers the impact of ubiquitous connectivity on navigation and travel and just how we may see less while being connected more. How does this new ‘virtual leash’ play out when the traveler is using social media networks and technology to traverse the globe? We continue by considering a different kind of journey as Margaret Gibson and Marga Altena explore the idea of ‘cybermourning’ in their chapter entitled ‘The Digital Lives of the Dead: YouTube as a Practice of Cybermourning.’ Investigating numerous videos on YouTube, they explore the idea of YouTube as a public place of mourning in a way that makes us reconsider our concepts of how we choose to memorialise the passing of other lives in a context that is filled with commercials and advertisers. They suggest that there changes taking place in how we deal with grief in public and how this space may serve to empower those who might have previously been