Chris Chesher

Becoming the Milky Way: Mobile Phones and Actor Networks at a U2 Concert

The world’s biggest band, U2, brought their spectacular Vertigo show to the Sydney Telstra Stadium in November 2006. Alongside 70,000 people who came to each performance, tens of thousands of mobile phones also attended. Seeing so many phones participating in such an event led me to ask: what connections could be made between the world’s most popular band and the world’s most popular portable electronic device? How did thousands of individuated connections mediated by mobile phones transform a ‘mass’ spectacle? What distinctive rituals of mobile phone use might be particular to the stadium? At the same time, what invisible actors were at work in the background to allow these rituals to be performed so effortlessly? Of all recently developed media technologies, mobile phones have a flexibility that allows them to articulate smoothly into a diversity of anticipated and unanticipated programmes of action. While many of these programmes take up certain phone ‘features’ and network capabilities, the openness of these devices to semi-improvised uses allows them to adapt to anything from everyday routines to special events. Mobile phones were constantly present in and around the U2 show, but their value and functions were different at different times. They helped some people to physically locate friends, or to connect with those not immediately present. Their cameras created, stored and transmitted images, and their backlights even became part of the light show. This article looks at how a number of distinctive, but sometimes apparently trivial, uses of mobile phone are structured by the pragmatics of events at the U2 concert. The show was staged in the massive non-place of the stadium (Augé, 1995), which has more in common with other stadiums anywhere than with other places in Sydney or Australia. The site provided a very suitable ethnographic location because the environment and the event presented certain challenges and opportunities for

Navigating sociotechnical spaces: Comparing computer games and sat navs as digital spatial media:

Digital media increasingly mediate everyday spatial and navigational practices. From in-car satellite navigation (sat navs) to computer games, overpowered gadgets are combining multiple sources of abstract information to give users spatial guidance and experiences of movement. For example, open world computer games such as Grand Theft Auto IV render rich fictional spaces, and include intricate maps and indicators that allow players to navigate large gamespaces. Sat navs such as the TomTom Navigator follow similar practices of automated navigation in helping to guide cars through actual spaces. Their calculated routes display on personalized maps, including live data and visualizations that complement, or even override, what the driver sees through the windscreen. Games and sat navs are harbingers of historical shifts in technosocial space, suggesting that Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) influential critical analysis of space deserves to be revised. Digital spatial media open up abstract relationships to space, but not from the distance that Lefebvre associates with ‘conceived’ spaces. Instead, they work in ‘lived space’, which is becoming dominant. They calculate space in real time, and open up new political and aesthetic questions. The article examines three characteristics of navigation with digital spatial media: (1) they reify routes as persuasive data and procedures; (2) their maps become subjective and privatized; and (3) they offer an array of spatial information that become incorporated into the user’s ‘perceived’ space. These examples show that critical understandings of social space need increasingly to incorporate readings of digitally mediated spatiality.

Toy robots on YouTube: Consumption and peer production at the robotic moment

Robots are increasingly prominent in the popular imagination, partly through people playing with toys and using social media. This article examines a selection of user-created YouTube videos in different genres that reveal how people experiment with toy robots such as the Furby. These devices have features that support different styles of play, which producers of YouTube clips explore in short narratives. They reveal how the intersubjective conventions for relating to robots are currently being developed. YouTube stars produce vlogs (video blogs) telling stories about their search for Furbys, unboxing them, and experimenting with the toy’s playful and uncanny features. Set-piece video producers experiment with how Furbys interact with others, such as trying to communicate, confronting family pets or being destroyed with weapons. Being ‘almost alive’, toy robots are harbingers of autonomous technologies that have social agency.

Robots and the Moving Camera in Cinema, Television and Digital Media

The moving camera is a ubiquitous element in visual culture, and one that is undergoing significant change. Camera movement has traditionally been bound to the capabilities of human bodies and their physical equipment. Computer-based and robotic systems are enabling changes in image genres, extending the fields of perception for viewers. Motion control systems provide much tighter control over the movement of the camera in space and time. On television, wire-suspended cameras such as Skycam and Spidercam provide aerial perspectives above sports fields and music venues. Drones bring to the image a fusion of intimacy and magical elevation. An emerging domain of vision systems is in robotics and surveillance systems that remove the human operator entirely from the production and interpretation of images. In each of these cases, the question of the subjectivity and objectivity of images is complicated.

Digitising the Beat Police Databases and Incoporeal Transformations

How do databases change policing? Police work is simultaneously heavily physical and highly bound by abstraction. Police exercise coercive power with the mandate of abstractions of law, regulations and record-keeping. In making an arrest, an officer acts physically, but also in language: transforming the subject into one in a state of being under arrest. This paper specifically examines the recently implemented Computerised Operational Policing System (COPS) to explore how computers affect the interplay of the abstractions of law and regulations with bodies in space.