[csaa-forum] CFP - The FIbreculture Journal - After Convergence

[Andrew Murphie]

Fibreculture Journal
http://journal.fibreculture.org


Call for papers

After convergence, what connects?

:: fibreculture :: has established itself as Australasia's leading forum for
discussion of internet theory, culture, and research. The Fibreculture
Journal is a peer-reviewed journal that explores the issues and ideas of
concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social
formations.

Papers are invited for the 'After convergence' issue of the Fibreculture
Journal, to be published early in 2008. Guest editors are Caroline Bassett
(Sussex, UK), Maren Hartmann (Bremen, Germany) and Kate O'Riordan
(Lancaster/Sussex, UK).

There are guidelines for the format and submission of contributions at
http://journal.fibreculture.org

These guidelines need to be followed in all cases. Contributions should be
sent electronically, as word attachments, to:

Guest editors:
Caroline Bassett (c.bassett at sussex.ac.uk)
Maren Hartmann (maren.hartmann at uni-bremen.de)
Kate O'Riordan (k.oriordan at lancaster.ac.uk)

Everything that arises does not converge. A more variegated landscape
emerges as processes of digitalization, crystallizations of an intrinsically
technological-social, continue re-shaping cultures and re-working societies,
not in their image, but into something new. It is increasingly obvious that
there is no digital behemoth, no single form, no single function, no New
World Order. Rather a series of reconfigurations, reformulations, new
functions, new contents, new spaces, new grounds, new uses, have emerged and
are emerging within global media networks.

In response to the (not unexpected) non-arrival of the unifying beast, which
is to say in response to the perceived exhaustion of convergence (or the
re-definition of its limits), new disciplinary islands are being declared
with 'keep out' and 'invented here' signs all over their beaches. In other
words there has been a balkanization of techno-cultural investigation. Thus
gaming scholars define themselves against internet scholars, or film
scholars, locatives stand distinct from screeners. Particular groups of
sub-specialists claim particular modes of inquiry: ethnographers for
everyday life, speculative theory for digital art, for instance. Indeed,
entire vocabularies, originally invoked in a spirit of general
experimentation, are now corralled, restricted and defended by particular
groups. If these vocabularies often seize up in the process, refusing to say
more than they were meant to say, and in particular refusing the unorthodox
connections between the empirical and the speculative, the possible and the
desirable, that gave them their energy in the first place, nobody seems to
notice.

So, there is no behemoth. At the same time we insist that connections are
produced and so a question we consider worth addressing is not what unites
digital forms as one, but what connects them together as many. Further we
want to explore how these connections are made. We are less interested in
doing that through mainstreaming a particular critical approach (which is to
say drawing different areas back under one critical umbrella, making that
the connection), than we are in trying to think about
exploring/defining/critiquing some of the shared characteristics of
different digital media formations. We believe that despite the exhaustion
of convergence metaphors, and the rise of disciplinary sub-divisions, these
connections remain crucial.


Papers addressing but not limited to the following topics are welcome:

•    Media/Medium Theory

•    Difference between and specificity of New Media forms

•    Issues, Limits, Problems of Convergence.

•    Re-thinking the vocabulary of Affect/Emotion/Perception

•    Histories of New Media Theory

•    'Technology and Cultural Form' revisited?

•    Methodologies


Deadlines:

•    250 word abstracts:     due February 28th 2007

•    Completed Paper:     due September 30th 2007

•    Expected Publication:     February 28th 2008.

-- 
"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast
back again into the open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)

Dr Andrew Murphie - Senior Lecturer
School of Media, Film and Theatre, University of New South Wales, Sydney,
Australia, 2052
web:http://media.arts.unsw.edu.au/andrewmurphie/mysite/index.html
fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: a.murphie at unsw.edu.au
room 311H, Webster Building
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