Beiträge in Sammelbänden
Recent Submissions
- Book partFlows and Streams of Data: Notes on Metaphors in Digital CulturesDenecke, Mathias (2020)Metaphors influence our understanding of digital cultures. Concentrating on flow and stream metaphors in an academic discourse, this article particularly focuses on the metaphorical description of data transmission. The aim is to describe rhetorical and theoretical potentials as well as challenges that result from the use of the metaphors. Finally, the article provides an alternative interpretation of the metaphors.
- Book partIntroductionFuchs, Christian; Chandler, David (2019)
- Book partLogistics of Probability: Anticipatory Shipping and the Production of MarketsPoechhacker, Nikolaus; Nyckel, Eva-Maria (2020)Predictive analytics is becoming increasingly important in various sectors of contemporary societies. At the same time logistical media have a profound impact on our everyday life. Both elements—the importance of logistical media and the growing impact of predictive analytics—are coming together in Amazon’s method of anticipatory shipping. By shipping packages based on the probability of an upcoming order, the logic of logistics is changed in a profound way. Based on the analysis of Amazon’s U.S. Patent No. 8,615,473 B2 (Spiegel et al. 2013), which describes the process of anticipatory shipping, we argue that this logistic of probability pre-assumes structures of desires and needs in the targeted community, while at the same time providing methods to realize these presumptions via the entanglement of anticipatory shipping with algorithmic logistical infrastructures and a second logic of prediction: the recommender system. Connecting these two forms of prediction via common centers of calculation (Latour 1987), these media logics become entangled by predicting as well as producing their customers’ demand at the same time and actively preparing the grounds for logistics of probability.
- Book partPerspectives on Post-Cinema: An IntroductionDenson, Shane; Leyda, Julia (2016)
- Book partCapital’s MediaBeverungen, Armin (2019)
- Book partAfrican Women in Cinema: An overviewEllerson, Beti (2005)
- Book partNoisy Internet! Web Journalism as an Epitome of the Internet’s AcousticnessDotzler, Bernhard J.; Ottmann, Solveig (2020)Spreading news has been one of the main functions of the internet from its very beginnings. As early as the beginning of the 1980s newspaper publishers started to offer news not just on paper, but online. This serves us as the starting point to scrutinize web journalism. Referring to certain moments in the history of e-newspapers and their utilization of more and more web and social media services, we want to investigate how the change in journalism epitomizes certain characteristics of the internet—or, to be more precise, how certain misconceptions of what e-papers are and of what the internet is overlap. Aiming for a better understanding of today’s digital culture we try to develop an idea of what we call the “acousticness,” or “noisiness,” of the internet, as opposed to the internet’s common conceptualization in visual terms.
- Book partVorwortThiele, Martina (2005)
- Book partCritical Affordance Analysis for Digital Methods: The Case of Gephivan Geenen, Daniela (2020)The following chapter addresses the need for “tool criticism” approaches in research designs that build on “digital methods,” and thus medium-specific methods, using the example of network exploration and mapping software Gephi. In order to perform tool criticism as an ongoing, active and reflective, situated and systematic approach, I develop the lens of “critical affordance analysis.” Drawing from and expanding the notion of “research affordances” I explore and inquire into the “account(‑)ability” of digital methods tools, on the one hand understood as offering and generating documentation of these tools’ workings, and on the other hand, as supporting the comprehensibility of their workings. In conclusion, I advocate approaching the design of the affordances, or action possibilities, of such knowledge instruments in epistemological terms.
- Book partA Sea of Data: Pattern Recognition and Corporate Animism (Forked Version)Steyerl, Hito (2018)
- Book partTemporalities of Instantaneity: Electric Wires and the Media of ImmediacySprenger, Florian (2020)
- Book partArchives of InconveniencePrelinger, Rick (2019)
- Book partHello from EarthBrunton, Finn (2019)
- Book partIntroduction: The web as historySchroeder, Ralph; Brügger, Niels (2017)
- Book partUnfriending and Becoming Unfriended on FacebookGashi, Liridona; Knautz, Kathrin (2016)When using social networking services, such as Facebook, it is easy to become friends with other users. Unfriending (or defriending) is easy as well, requiring only that a user click on Facebook’s “Unfriend” button. This chapter highlights the types of friends who are most often unfriended on Facebook, the role of unfriending in connection with emotions, reasons for unfriending others, and being unfriended by someone. Furthermore, we concentrate on avoiding contact after the act of unfriending. Additionally, we investigate whether hiding and blocking can be interpreted as options for discontinuing contact, as well as why people might choose an alternative to unfriending. We conducted our research using unfriending applications, which demonstrate to the user he or she has been unfriended. The empirical basis of our research consists of 2,201 questionnaires, completed by individuals with Facebook accounts.
- Book partMedia Organize: PersonsMartin, Reinhold (2019)
- Book partRemain(s) ScatteredParikka, Jussi (2019)
- Book partAnimation of the Technical and the Quest for BeautyKoch, Gertrud (2019)
- Book partGoverning Objects from a Distance: Blockchains as Organizers of EnvironmentalityLeistert, Oliver (2020)Of the phenomena in the field of media technologies that have conquered imaginations and funding buckets recently, blockchain technologies, next to artificial intelligence and machine learning, might be considered the most striking example. The blockchain constitutes a protocological internet layer for values that corresponds to a continuing monetization pressure and ongoing expansion of identification strategies. Notwithstanding these trajectories, behind this prospective killer application resides first of all a sovereign chronological regime that has the capacities to prove and modulate the existence, identity and administration of data, assets, goods and services from a distance on granular scales.
- Book partThe Paranoid Machine: Five Theses on Digital CulturesApprich, Clemens (2020)In the following article I want to propose the idea of a paranoid machine, in order to reflect on some of today’s developments in digital cultures. Starting from the assumption that we experience a shift from mass media to social media, I will show how paranoia can provide a diagnostic tool to analyze such a transformation. Paranoia as a method helps to shed light on the epistemological, technological, ethical, political, and aesthetical implications of a (post-)digital world. The paranoid machine exposes hidden assumptions in computer code and calls for intervention in the narcissist and homophilic disposition of digital cultures.