scholarly journals Chaos Computer Club: The Communicative Construction of Media Technologies and Infrastructures as a Political Category

2017 ◽  
pp. 81-100
Author(s):  
Sebastian Kubitschko
2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrés Luque-Ayala ◽  
Flávia Neves Maia

This article examines the mobilisation of spatial media technologies for digitally mapping informal settlements. It argues that digital mapping operates politically through a re-configuration of circulation, power, and territorial formations. Drawing on Stuart Elden’s understanding of territory, where space is ‘rendered’ as a political category, the coming together of digital mapping and the geoweb is uncovered as a political technique re-making territory through computational logics – operating as a calculative practice that, beyond simply representing space, is productive of the political spatiality that characterises territory. The article is based on an analysis of recent attempts by ICT corporates, particularly Google, to map favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, critically examining the claim that digitally mapping informal settlements is a mechanism for socio-economic inclusion. Providing a counterargument to claims around the power of digital maps to incorporate favelas, provide recognition, legitimacy, visibility and citizenship, we discuss how in the interface between digital and urban worlds, territory as a political space is constructed through economic incorporation. In doing so, the article unpacks the spatial politics of digital and smart urbanisms and the emerging sovereignties of digital territories, particularly in the context of the tension between inclusion and exclusion experienced by those who live in informal settlements in cities in the global South.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Kubitschko

Practices related to media technologies and infrastructures (MTI) are an increasingly important part of democratic constellations in general and of surveillance tactics in particular. This article does not seek to discuss surveillance <em>per se</em>, but instead to open a new line of inquiry by presenting qualitative research on the Chaos Computer Club (CCC)—one of the world’s largest and Europe’s oldest hacker organizations. Despite the longstanding conception of hacking as infused with political significance, the scope and style of hackers’ engagement with emerging issues related to surveillance remains poorly understood. The rationale of this paper is to examine the CCC as a civil society organization that counter-acts contemporary assemblages of surveillance in two ways: first, by de-constructing existing technology and by supporting, building, maintaining and using alternative media technologies and infrastructures that enable more secure and anonymous communication; and second, by articulating their expertise related to contemporary MTI to a wide range of audiences, publics and actors. Highlighting the significance of “privacy” for the health of democracy, I argue that the hacker organization is co-determining “interstitial spaces within information processing practices” (Cohen, 2012, p. 1931), and by doing so is acting on indispensable structural features of contemporary democratic constellations.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelia Gerdenitsch ◽  
Bettina Kubicek ◽  
Christian Korunka

Supported by media technologies, today’s employees can increasingly decide when and where to work. The present study examines positive and negative aspects of this temporal and spatial flexibility, and the perceptions of control in these situations based on propositions of self-determination theory. Using an exploratory approach we conducted semi-structured interviews with 45 working digital natives. Participants described positive and negative situations separately for temporal and spatial flexibility, and rated the extent to which they felt autonomous and externally controlled. Situations appraised positively were best described by decision latitude, while negatively evaluated ones were best described by work–nonwork conflict. Positive situations were perceived as autonomous rather than externally controlled; negative situations were rated as autonomously and externally controlled to a similar extent.


Author(s):  
S. V. Akmanova ◽  
L. V. Kurzaeva ◽  
N. A. Kopylova

The harmonious existence of the individual in the modern informational era, which is overly saturated with rapidly developing media technologies, is almost impossible without the developed readiness of the individual for lifelong continuous self-education. The formation and development of this readiness can begin during the formal training at the stage of higher education of the person and continue during informal education throughout his future life. Stages of socialization and professionalization of the person have a great influence on the level nature of this readiness. Based on scientific achievements in the field of self-education of university students, national and world media education, we developed dynamic and competence models of media educational concept of developing a person’s readiness for lifelong self-education. The concept demonstrates interconnection of these two models, as well as consistency with the previously developed normative model of developing this readiness.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyke Stommel ◽  
Fleur Van der Houwen

In this article, we examine problem presentations in e-mail and chat counseling. Previous studies of online counseling have found that the medium (e.g., chat, email) impacts the unfolding interaction. However, the implications for counseling are unclear. We focus on problem presentations and use conversation analysis to compare 15 chat and 22 e-mail interactions from the same counseling program. We find that in e-mail counseling, counselors open up the interactional space to discuss various issues, whereas in chat, counselors restrict problem presentations and give the client less space to elaborate. We also find that in e-mail counseling, clients use narratives to present their problem and orient to its seriousness and legitimacy, while in chat counseling, they construct problem presentations using a symptom or a diagnosis. Furthermore, in email counseling, clients close their problem presentations stating completeness, while in chat counseling, counselors treat clients’ problem presentations as incomplete. Our findings shed light on how the medium has implications for counseling.


Author(s):  
Christo Sims

In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. This book documents the life of the school from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class. It is the account of how this “school for digital kids,” heralded as a model of tech-driven educational reform, reverted to a more conventional type of schooling with rote learning, an emphasis on discipline, and traditional hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized class divisions also emerged. The book shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes. It traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. It offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform—in this case, the students and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle. The book offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.


Author(s):  
Shannon Lucky ◽  
Dinesh Rathi

Social media technologies have the potential to be powerful knowledge sharing and community building tools for both corporate and non-profit interests. This pilot study explores the social media presence of a group of forty-six Alberta-based non-profit organizations (NPOs) in this information rich space. In this paper we look at the pattern of presence of NPOs using social media and relationships with staffing structures.Les médias sociaux ont la capacité d’être de puissants outils de partage de la connaissance et de rassemblement communautaire pour les organisations à but lucratif et sans but lucratif. Cette étude pilote explore la présence dans les médias sociaux d’un groupe de quarante-six organisations sans but lucratif (OSBL) albertaines dans cet environnement riche en information. La communication portera sur les modèles de présence des OSBL dans les médias sociaux et les liens avec les structures organisationnelles.


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