Ian Reyes

Virtuality as place and process

Abstract Virtual worlds are conventionally understood as representational places, or alternate realities more or less set apart from the real world. However, in considering new and emergent technologies, such as social media sites and augmented reality devices, which complicate any easy distinction between virtual and real, we contend that virtuality should also be understood as a matter of process, or the means by which virtualisation is realised. Focusing on theorisations clustered around Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, we compare Baudrillardian concepts to other possible theorisations in order to shed light on practices including transmediation and information management at the dawning of the age of Big Data.

Disconnected/connected On the “look” and the “gaze” of cell phones

Informed by nonparticipant observations of public cell phone use, we offer a Lacanian theorization of common social scenes involving mobile communication technologies. Identifying paradoxes of the mobile mediascape, such as connected versus disconnected and public versus private, we turn to Lacan’s distinction between the look and the gaze to read and reconcile these tensions. Moving beyond understanding cell phones as fetish objects, we use Lacan’s theory of the gaze as a means to understand the existential dilemma, a lack of being, which underwrites the pleasures of consumption. At the heart of the matter is how cell phones mobilize users’ desires and anxieties as social subjects in a mediatized consumptionscape.

Mobile Media: From Legato to Staccato, Isochronal Consumptionscapes

Mobile devices in the form of smartphones are transforming the temporality of consumption experiences, from languid and legato forms to isochronal and staccato forms. New communication technologies accelerate as well as alter mobile consumptionscapes. Rather than attempting to capture the elusive here-and-now essence of such fast-changing scenes, this essay invokes three historical episodes of technology and mobility – the transistor radio, the Walkman-style cassette device, and the MP3 player – to uncover the patterns that enhanced levels of mobility bring to the media consumption experience. In particular, by illuminating matters of time, some temporal framings are offered as correctives to spatially biased theories of mobile media. Drawing lessons from these historical episodes and blending in contemporary social theories about mobile technologies, we arrive at a temporally oriented view of the emergent consumptionscapes that can contribute to understanding the present era and the proximal future in terms of connecting both places and paces.

To Know Beyond Listening: Monitoring Digital Music

ABSTRACT In music production, “monitoring” refers traditionally to audile strategies intended to reveal the “true” sound of mediated audio. Here, it is expanded to include new, digital technologies intended to better know and control the record-object beyond what listening and listening technologies allow. Surveying traditional, contemporary, and emerging tools of record production and distribution, this essay addresses three types of monitoring: audio, visual, and data. In sum, monitoring entails the supplementation and subversion of the ear through protocols promising to surmount the biases and distortions of audio media. Key technologies include reference speakers, room correction systems, digital audio workstations, open mixes, pre-sets, social networking sites, and automatic music information retrieval. Situating these within a “techoustemology” of monitoring, the central argument is that many innovations in digital audio are non-auditory and, therefore, displace sound and listening as the central means of producing relevant knowledge about music mediated in the digital age.

Mobile phone: marketplace icon

ABSTRACT The mobile phone is an essential component of early twenty-first century societies, markets, and economies. The mobile handset in particular has become the synechdocal symbol of major socio-economic transformations the world over. Through an abbreviated history of mobile handsets, touching on each of the first three generations of mobile phones, this Marketplace Icon installment traces the evolution of the look, feel, and function of mobiles from the earliest analog “bricks” to the latest digital smartphones. Based on this history, the frictions of technologies, bodies, individuals, and institutions emerge as key forces in the construction of mobiles and mobility. In light of these, the possibility of an end to the iconic mobile phone era is augured and some contours for a new era of mobility are suggested, one in which handsets are less prominent and consumer embodiment is taken more seriously as the true heart of mobility, mobile technologies, and mobile markets.

What They Don't Want You to Know About Planet X: Surviving 2012 and the Aesthetics of Conspiracy Rhetoric

Predictions of catastrophe at the end of the year 2012 are popular enough to be exploited by Hollywood and debunked by NASA. Drawing from a YouTube video series predicting a 2012 cataclysm caused by “Planet X,” we ask whether the discourse in question is a conspiracy theory and demonstrate how it exemplifies the challenges of analyzing rhetoric in the “paranoid style.” Examining these videos in terms of evidence, credibility, and inter-textuality, this article articulates an aesthetic of conspiracism, going beyond identifying the components of paranoid style to answer what makes a good conspiracy theory as such.

Transmedia Perspective on Entrepreneurship

Dholakia, Reyes, and Kerrigan, arguing that transmedia worlds have been disrupting the media since the 1990s, position this disruption within wider discussions of media fragmentation, increasing audience activity, and new storytelling modalities within organizations. In outlining the origins of transmedia businesses, the authors draw parallels between transmedia businesses and entrepreneurship. They connect the development of transmedia worlds to wider discussions of entrepreneurship in the film and media industries, in which technological developments constantly influence practice. Dholakia et al. draw on socioeconomic and cultural theories to present an analysis of how transmedia growth would impact entrepreneurship, innovation, creative economies, and the trajectories of established media firms and brand owners. The authors also offer transmedia worlds as possible antidotes to declining rates of entrepreneurship in the US.

Media, markets and violence

ABSTRACT Media have multipronged linkages to violence, and these have been studied in considerable detail in the fields of communication and media studies. With commercialisation of media and the rapid decline of paying subscribers, for their survival in a capitalist economy, media have to rely increasingly on advertising revenues, and on other ways of linking to markets. Portrayals of violence have become reliable vehicles for ensuring media profitability – in terms of generating advertising revenue – as well as for generating revenue streams via related market-developing and market-maintaining ways. With the advent of new media – social media, virtual reality media and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-robotics-sentient media – the nexus of media, markets and violence is beginning to transform. This paper offers concepts and frames to start exploring the new patterns of linkages across media, markets and violence.

Mediating a Soundwalk: An Exercise in Claireaudience

This article details the use of field recorders as part of a soundwalk intended to make listening itself an object of scrutiny. A soundwalk is an outing wherein one concentrates on listening to certain aspects of the soundscape, just as one might take a guided tour to admire the landscape. However, as scholars of sound and listening are well aware, hearing is a secondary sense. Therefore, this activity is designed to push sound to the foreground by remediating sounds through headphones. While this was conceived for teaching basic production skills, its aim to foster critical practices of and discourse on listening should be of broader pedagogical interest and application. In this exercise, students experience listening as a microphone does, without intentionality or judgment, and with great sensitivity. The purpose is to introduce students to a critical listening technique allowing them to overcome their cultural conditioning, to become conscious of sound as such, and to recognize that ones ears do more than receive sound, they actually produce it.