Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 12, Issue 1-2, 2013

This article considers the ethics of sexual telepresence by tracing the history of mechanical and digital sex and exploring the possibilities facilitated by current and emerging technology. My aim is to consider how people have used technology to engage in new forms of sexual expression in order to more clearly delineate exactly what constitutes cheating and the ethical lines surrounding such behaviours. As with non-digital forms of intimacy, it seems clear that there is a range of behaviours that invite different people to draw the lines in different places, ranging from flirtation to erotic talk, to physical contact. But the goal of this article is not merely to consider where the lines may lie, but rather to examine how the medium in which the interaction takes place invites individuals to make particular moral judgments concerning what lines should exist at all concerning both physical and emotional intimacy.

This article develops the concept of ‘modes’ through a survey of media theory and examples from digital media. Theorists who employ the concept offers three insights: modes are changes to perception affected by media, are the ways humans link with media to produce desire, and are liminal forms shared by producers and consumers. Examples from digital media also provide three lessons: modes direct media interfacing, constituting a software of perception that operates via a ‘perceiving as’ similar to metaphor. Media scholars should study modes because the digital environment capitalizes on modes, with the potential for dark clouds and silver linings.

This article considers some ways in which mobile listening – listening to music on headphones while being in, and moving through, public space – mediates the lived experience of space. I explore this particular human–technology relation through the lens of ‘anemone theory’, an embodied understanding of the movements of mediation as they modulate the real-time unfolding of experience. I contextualize my analysis with concepts from the fields of acoustic ecology and soundscape studies (e.g., acoustic transparency, hi-fi and lo-fi soundscapes) and post-phenomenological perspectives on human–technology relations (e.g., technological intentionality).

This article presents the ‘Educational Totem Project’, which was implemented during March to May in 2011, in Pelourinho, the Historic Center of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The project consists of available audio files containing narratives about five tourist sites: Terreiro de Jesus (Jesus’ Courtyard), Catedral Basílica (Cathedral Basilica), Igreja de São Francisco (San Fracisco Church), Antiga Faculdade de Medicina (Former Medicine College) and Centro Cultural Solar Ferrão (Mansion Ferrão Culture Center). These sound narratives are sent to digital mobile devices through three forms: by bluetooth, QR Codes and USB driver. The principal issue discussed in this project was the relationship between communication and place. Locative Communication could be considered a different form of communication. The information about the place is being sent to the cell phone, which adds meaning, reinforcing the sense of belonging.

This article attempts to (re)write the local history of Baguio, a chartered city constructed by the Americans in the early 1900s. Informed by the concepts of spatiality or the organization of space as a social product (Foucault 2003: 19) and Henri Lefebvre’s triad of spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces, I have conducted an intertextual interrogation of selected epistolary entries of colonial tourists, ‘official’ or otherwise, like Dean C. Worcester and Maud Huntley Jenks, vintage brochures, maps and other forms of ‘tourist art’ (Best 2001: 65), as well as little known fiction of Filipino writers in English Sinai C. Hamada and Lina Espina-Moore. This intertextual approach has allowed me to negotiate alternative routes to the reformulation of the assertion that history and space are never neutral but are steeped in power relations.

This article examines historic changes occurring in Europe related to printing and cartography as they played out on Cape Breton Island during the eighteenth century. The research explores Cape Breton maps as one example of the reciprocal relationship between technologies, ideas and natural environments. The advent of print engendered a transformation in human thought that elevated rational, scientific ways of knowing. Technology and ideology worked hand in hand to reshape the world through the use of increasingly accurate maps to explore and exploit new territory. The gradual shift from imaginative to increasingly accurate cartographic representations reveals the blending and balancing of artistic and scientific sensibilities in Europe and the New World. Advances in Europeans’ ability to more accurately map trade routes led to expanded knowledge about the world, particularly about peripheral regions with strategic or commercial potential. Cape Breton maps illustrate changes occurring in Europe and intimate the global consequences of those changes. Cape Breton’s geographic positioning and abundant cod stocks made the island important to both France and England. Cape Breton maps evolved through an exchange of ideas occurring in both Europe and the New World, particularly at Louisbourg because of its pivotal role as a centre for trade and military activity in the Anglo-French competition for control of North America.

Marshall McLuhan’s deployment of figure and ground to explain media relations has been complicated by new technologies that open the control and flow of information to general users. This renders contingent the reading of context and content as users familiarize themselves with new forms. At such times, according to McLuhan, creative works may aid adjustments in perspective. Gilles Deleuze argues, for example, that the moving image inherited an essence from the traditional arts but had to adjust the gaze of users to a new logic of display. One way this was done was through framing a screen as a figure in the text of a moving picture scenario. In this way early film characterized how (and how not) to gaze at the screen itself and later, techniques of production were devised to sustain a seamless immersion in the ground of screen entertainments. By presenting technology as a narrative figure (a robot) that gains understanding of human behaviour through screens, the feature animation, WALL-E (Stanton, 2008), offers an opportunity to interrogate the shifting boundaries of human and digital cultures, suggesting the need for McLuhanite adjustment of Deleuzian claims about technological inheritance.

This article places disparate voices in productive conversation concerning pedagogical reform in the era of media convergence. I argue that despite ideological differences, the language arts curriculum of classical schooling is consonant in motivation and technique with the media literacy skills of critical cultural studies. By reading the classically rooted works of Dorothy Sayers, Sr Miriam Joseph and Marshall McLuhan across the critical theories of Douglas Kellner, Jeff Share and Paulo Freire, I identify points of confluence that make such a separation lamentable, as well as illustrate how a coordinated curriculum can work to further the interests of all concerned regardless of ideology.

Amor Technologiae: Marshall McLuhan as Philosopher of Technology – Toward a Philosophy of Human-Media Relationships, Yoni Van Den Eede (2012) Brussels, Belgium: ASP VUB Press, 517 pp., ISBN: 978-9057181870, p/bk, €29.95

Titanic Century: Media, Myth and the Making of a Cultural Icon, Paul Heyer (2012) Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 211 pp., ISBN 978-0-313-39815-5, h/bk, $48.00

Media Environments, Barry Vacker (ed.) (2010) San Diego, CA: Cognella, 546 pp., ISBN: 978-1935551348, p/bk, $142.50

Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell, Katie King (2012) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 392 pp., ISBN: 978-0822350729, p/bk, $25.95