Journal articles on the topic 'Computer Telephony Integration'

A set of fixed-phone cluster management system was designed based on C&C08 program control unit and next generation network (NGN). C&C08 is responsible for the bottom access and transfer of the fixed-phone calls. Applying the computer telephony integration (CTI) technology we can realize the telephone call management through a computer. Using this system, fixed telephone managers can conduct limitation control for cluster management users information and implement list query of cost easily, so that managers can know the detail cost. In addition, based on the present situation of the telecom business, we designed four telecommunication services for enterprises and institutions, and added them to the fixed-phone cluster management system. For the cluster management users, they can subscribe to those services according to their needs.

Today with the growth of the internet, the use of social networks, mobile telephony, connected and communicating objects. The data has become so big, hence the need to exploit that data has become primordial. In practice, a very large number of companies specializing in the health sector, the banking and financial sector, insurance, manufacturing industry, etc… are based on traditional databases which are often well organized of customer data, machine data, etc ... but in most cases, very large volumes of data from these databases, and the speed with which they must be analyzed to meet the business needs of the company are real challenges. This article aims to respond to a problem of generating NoSQL MongoDB databases by applying an approach based on model-driven engineering (Model Driven Architecture Approach). We provide Model to Model (using the QVT model transformation language), and Model to Code transformations (using the code generator, Acceleo). We also propose vertical and horizontal transformations to demonstrate the validity of our approach on NoSQL MongoDB databases. We have studied in this article the PSM transformations towards the implementation. PIM to PSM transformations are the subject of another work.

The growing power of computer-telephony integration (CTI) systems is encouraging many companies to create call centres. These deal with a growing range of business processes and, in doing so, can be used to challenge established organizational arrangements. The range of human and management issues that need to be dealt with has yet to become clear. Some insights into these are offered from a study of one call centre over 2 years, from shortly before its physical introduction to the present day. These empirical observations are set within the wider literature on organizational change and information technology (IT), particularly the processual and integrationist perspectives. The paper uses the evidence of the case to elaborate the integrationist model so that it reflects the areas of human action more fully. It concludes by outlining the implications of this perspective for managers seeking to build effective call centres or other forms of interorganizational IT system.

Those who solve more of a given type of problem tend to get better at it—which suggests that problems of any given type should be brought to specialists for a solution. However, in this paper we argue that agency-related costs and information transfer costs (“sticky” local information) will tend drive the locus of problem-solving in the opposite direction—away from problem-solving by specialist suppliers, and towards those who directly benefit from a solution and who have difficult-to-transfer local information about a particular application being solved, such as the direct users of a product or service. We examine the actual location of design activities in two fields in which custom products are produced by “mass-customization” methods: application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and computer telephony integration (CTI) systems. In both, we find that users rather than suppliers are the actual designers of the application-specific portion of the product types examined. We offer anecdotal evidence that the pattern of user-based customization we have documented in these two fields is in fact quite general, and we discuss implications for research and practice.

Telecommunication technology is developing along with information technology and several innovations in several audio and data transmission and reception techniques. Innovation and communication technology are hoped to be able to create efficiencies in regards to time, equipment, and cost. The Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) telephone technology has experienced integration towards communication using Internet Protocol (IP) networks, better known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). VoIP Technology transmits conversations digitally through IP-based networks, such as internet networks, Wide Area Networks (WAN), and Local Area Networks (LAN). However, the VoIP cannot fully replace PSTN due to several weaknesses, such as delay, jitter, packet loss, as well as security and echo. Telephones calls using VoIP technology are executed using terminals in the form of computer devices or existing analogue telephones. The benefit of VoIP is that it can be set in all ethernet and IP addresses. Prefixes can be applied for inter-server placements as inter-building telephone networks without the addition of inefficient new cables on single board computers with Elastix installed. Prefix and non-prefix analysis on servers from single board computers can be tested using QoS for bandwidth, jitter, and packet loss codec. The installation of 6 clients, or 3 simultaneous calls resulted in a packet loss value in the prefix Speex codex of 2.34%. The bandwidth in the prefix PCMU codec has an average value of 82.3Kbps, and a non-prefix value of 79.3Kbps, in accordance to the codec standards in the VoIP. The lowest jitter was found in the non-prefix PCMU codec with an average of 51.05ms, with the highest jitter for the prefix Speex codec being 314.65ms.

From a cautious start in the use of computers in the early 1970s, the Geological Survey of Greenland has developed complex and varied uses of modern computer facilities for both scientific and administrative tasks. GGU's first computer installation, a noisy TTY connected to the Computing Centre of Copenhagen University by a 110 baud telephone modem, was a selfservice facility which was not easy to use. Over the years, first with use of a PDP-10 with just one Tektronix 4014 graphic terminal and later a succession of increasingly powerful PDP-11s with many terminals, GGU's in-house facilities just kept ahead of the ever increasing demand for computer services. At the same time a number of programs for special tasks were developed on external facilities, because they required larger computers or special facilities. In the 1980s the demands on the computer facilitiesrequiring many different types of programs, including word processing, had grown so large that GGU's in-house system could no longer handle them satisfactorily. A major reorganisation was required, and consequently activities were divided between personal computers (PCs; mainly administrative) and a new central computer (mainly scientific). This development took place in late 1986 with the purchase of 17 new personal computers and a new central computer with accessory peripheral equipment. This has allowed an increasing integration of computer methods into GGU's activities. A brief summary is given below.

ssessing cancer treatment-related symptoms is challenging for frontline telephone-triage nurses toggling multiple electronic health record (EHR) screens for information on toxicity-risk predictors while simultaneously providing over-the-phone emotional support. Decision-support tools embedded into computer-telephone interface software, called smart phrases, are not widely used nor empirically evaluated for usability and remote symptom management impact.

XXI Century television is undergoing a process of transformation. New actors, new products and new ways of consuming television are on the lookout. Interactivity will make the traditional concept of television disappear. Television viewers can design their own grids independently of the operator’s schedule. The convergence of television and computer, Internet, telephone and video games bring us a new concept of television. Television faces two big transformations: digital transformation and that of the concept of «general public». The computer, the computer screen, has the calling of turning into a reception screen in which both computer and television functions fuse. Latest generation mobile telephony is integrating itself is this multimedia complex, in connection with television. Future television cannot dissociate from the Internet. La televisión del siglo XXI está en proceso de transformación. Nuevos actores, nuevos productos y nuevas formas de consumir televisión se atisban en el horizonte. La interactividad con la televisión hará desaparecer el concepto de televisión tradicional. El telespectador puede confeccionar sus propias parrillas, independientemente de la programación del operador. La convergencia de la televisión con el ordenador, Internet, el teléfono y los videojuegos nos llevan a un nuevo concepto de la televisión. La televisión se enfrenta a dos grandes transformaciones: la transformación digital y del concepto «público general». La nueva televisión propiciará una nueva forma de ver la televisión, en la que el espectador se olvidará del mundo para dialogar con la máquina e incluso, tomar decisiones que afecten a la programación. El anunciado apagón digital, previsto en España para 2010, va a revolucionar el panorama televisivo español. La oferta se ampliará y se sumará a la oferta del cable, satélite y teléfono. Se ampliarán las ofertas de televisión de pago. Estaremos ante un panorama absolutamente cambiante.

In September 1995 the Language Institute at the University of Hull and British Telecommunications plc began working together on a major research project with the aim developing an environment to support distance teaching and learning. Project MERLIN is exploring the latest commincations techologies to support interaction and collaboration between groups of remote learners, and between these learneers and their tutor. These technologies include: computer conferencing, dynamic HTML and the integration of specifically designed database and telephone-conferencing facilities with the World Wide Web interface.

Background Mobile stroke units (MSUs) reduce time to thrombolytic therapy in acute ischemic stroke. These units are widely used, but the clinical information systems underlying MSU operations are understudied. Objective The first MSU on the East Coast of the United States was established at New York Presbyterian Hospital (NYP) in October 2016. We describe our program's 7-month pilot, focusing on the integration of our hospital's clinical information systems into our MSU to support patient care and research efforts. Methods NYP's MSU was staffed by two paramedics, one radiology technologist, and a vascular neurologist. The unit was equipped with four laptop computers and networking infrastructure enabling all staff to access the hospital intranet and clinical applications during operating hours. A telephone-based registration procedure registered patients from the field into our admit/discharge/transfer system, which interfaced with the institutional electronic health record (EHR). We developed and implemented a computerized physician order entry set in our EHR with prefilled values to permit quick ordering of medications, imaging, and laboratory testing. We also developed and implemented a structured clinician note to facilitate care documentation and clinical data extraction. Results Our MSU began operating on October 3, 2016. As of April 27, 2017, the MSU transported 49 patients, of whom 16 received tissue plasminogen activator (t-PA). Zero technical problems impacting patient care were reported around registration, order entry, or intranet access. Two onboard network failures occurred, resulting in computed tomography scanner malfunctions, although no patients became ineligible for time-sensitive treatment as a result. Thirteen (26.5%) clinical notes contained at least one incomplete time field. Conclusion The main technical challenges encountered during the integration of our hospital's clinical information systems into our MSU were onboard network failures and incomplete clinical documentation. Future studies are necessary to determine whether such integrative efforts improve MSU care quality, and which enhancements to information systems will optimize clinical care and research efforts.

This paper introduces some primitive methods about hydro information transmission firstly, and then focuses on airborne remote sensing real-time transmission system and point-to-point duplex transmission in real time. The modes of hydro information transmission, including telephone network, satellite, short wave, ultra short wave and computer network communication etc, have realized the information transmission of “the integration of Satellite-Airborne-Ground”. The information transmission of airborne remote sensing real-time transmission system adopts the transmission of “Satellite-Airplane-Ground”. Point-to-point duplex transmission system in real time consists of two nodes which have the capacity of “point-to-point” duplex data transmission.

ICT—Information and Communication Technology is an extensional term for Information Technology (IT) that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of telecommunications (telephone lines and wireless signals) and computers, as well as necessary enterprise software, middleware, storage, and...ICT helps teacher to pass information to students within a very little time. ICT helps teacher to design educational environment. ICT helps teacher to identify creative child in educational institute. ICT helps teacher to motivate students and growing interest in learning. The paper envisages the maximum or at least optimum utility of ICT for the process of teaching and learning.

Starting in 1935 as a small manufacturer of telephone equipment, Fujitsu grew phenomenally to become a world leader in computers. Its strategy of global reach, based on leveraging the firm's focal faculties (in high-speed information processing, large-scale integration, etc.) through carefully structured international operations, served to destabilize established competitors and benefit customers. In early 1991, Fujitsu's Executive Board had to decide on its future approach to “competing in computing” in the face of dramatic developments in this high-tech industry. Readers are welcome to send their responses on this case — diagnoses, prescriptions and generalizations � to Vikalpa office.

In a recent survey conducted by the Directorate for European Integration in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it appears that 43.6% of respondents believe that there is an alternative to the European Union (EU) membership. The survey was conducted by using the Computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) method, on a sample that is representative for the entire country. Therefore, this article will explore the possibility of pursuing foreign policy that is geared towards several geopolitical centres and implications for the country. Primarily, this refers to alternative development models offered by international actors such as China, Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Although the EU often emphasises commitment to the Western Balkan region, both internal and external processes are becoming heavily politicised. In this regard, the author will also attempt to examine some of these processes and the main stakeholders (both in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the European Union), who could stall the future European integration.

This paper aims to identify key factors related to information management and integration in the supply chain (SC). The initial set of factors was identified in the literature, namely, information quality and content, performance metrics, and information technologies. The construct was then tested empirically using the sample of 200 Polish companies. Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI) were based on a structured questionnaire, then, data exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed. The conducted EFA determined four main factors for information management and integration in the supply chain that should be considered, namely, information characteristics, ICT used in information management, the scope of information and shared performance metrics. Results confirmed the importance of some of the factors related to information management in the supply chain, however having a different set of variables than indicated in the literature. Additionally, research introduced new factors, namely, information characteristics and the scope of shared information, instead of information quality and information content. Moreover, findings suggested that the key role in SC information integration was related to established technologies, focused on transport, customer, and ERP management, while emerging technologies, such as cloud computing and data mining were not of the top importance among the surveyed companies.

Abstract Background Absolute cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk assessment is recommended for primary prevention of CVD, yet uptake in general practice is limited. Cholesterol requests at pathology services provide an opportunity to improve uptake by integrating absolute CVD risk assessment with this service. Objective This study aimed to assess the feasibility of such an additional service. Methods Two-hundred and ninety-nine patients (45–74 years) referred to pathology services for blood cholesterol had measurement of all variables required to determine absolute CVD risk according to Framingham calculator (blood pressure, age, sex, smoking and diabetes status via self-report). Data were recorded via computer-based application. The absolute risk score was communicated via the report sent to the referring medical practitioner as per usual practice. Evaluation questionnaires were completed immediately post visit and at 1-, 3- and 6-month follow-up via telephone (n = 262). Results Absolute CVD risk reports were issued for 90% of patients. Most patients (95%) reported that the length of time for the pathology service assessment was acceptable, and 91% that the self-directed computer-based application was easy to use. Seventy-eight per cent reported a preference for pathology services to conduct absolute CVD risk assessment. Only 2% preferred a medical practitioner. Of follow-up patients, 202 (75%) had a consultation with a medical practitioner, during which, aspects of CVD risk prevention were discussed (cholesterol and blood pressure 74% and 69% of the time, respectively). Conclusions Measurement of absolute CVD risk in pathology services is feasible, highly acceptable among middle-to-older adults and may increase uptake of guideline-directed care in general practice.

Science and technology are expected to support actual service provision and to create new services to promote service industries’ productivity. However, those problems might not be solved solely in a certain research area. This paper describes that it is necessary to establish transdisciplinary approaches to service design in consideration of consumers’ values and decision making. Recent research trends of services are overviewed. Then a research framework is proposed to integrate computer sciences, human sciences, and economic sciences. Three study examples of services are then presented. The first study is a multi-agent simulation of a cellular telephone market based on results of a psychological survey. The second presents a cognitive model constructed through integration of questionnaire data of a retail business and Bayesian network modeling. The third presents a pricing mechanism design for service facilities––movie theaters––using an economic experiment and agent-based simulation.

Efficient banking solutions are an integral part of the business integration of South African and Nigerian economies as the two largest economies in the continent. Security, effectiveness, and integration of banking systems are critical to the sustainable development of the African continent. Therefore, an empirical analysis of the production of research on banking services and systems was conducted. The aim of the study was to examine the robustness of the research findings on banking systems in terms of their importance for the economic sustainability of the continent in the era of the fourth industrial revolution. The study adopted a bibliometric analysis using software clusters to visualize the results. Due to higher visibility of outputs and likely citations, the results showed that the key terms from Google Scholar are ranked higher than outputs from Scopus. Main research interests were related to internet banking (f = 70), e-payment systems (f = 57), telephone banking (f = 56), automated teller machines (f = 54), and mobile banking (f = 40). The results also showed a very low research interest in the technical aspect of online banking services such as security (f = 19, TLS = 40), authentication (f = 17, TLS =33), network security (f =13, TLS = 33), computer crime (f = 16, TLS = 42), and online banking (f = 11, TLS =32). The study found there were insufficient outputs in the area of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) and banking services in Africa. Future research trends should examine the impact of the 4IR and big data on the banking system, regional economic integration, and sustainable growth in the continent.

Cohort ’18 Growing Up in Hungary is a longitudinal birth cohort study run by the Hungarian Demographic Research Institute that will follow the lives of more than 8,000 children from before birth. The purpose of this countrywide representative study is to provide an overview of child development in Hungary and the factors influencing it. The main areas of data collection comprise demographics, social background, health and development. The observation began in 2018, among pregnant women in the 28th to 31st week of pregnancy. Within the first financially covered period of the research programme, this prenatal wave is followed by four further data collection waves: when the child is 6 months, 18 months, 27–30 months and 3 years old. During each of the waves, mothers, as primary caregivers, are interviewed either face to face or by telephone. There is also a computer-assisted telephone interview with the father, when the child is 18 months old. The primary data collection is supplemented by the integration of data from administrative systems. So far, two waves of Cohort ’18 have taken place (prenatal and six-month). The first resulted in a database of 8,287 pregnant women (8,409 foetuses). Following the next waves (which will cover children up to the age of three years), plans are in hand for further financial periods of the research programme – right up until the children are grown up. This study profile introduces readers to Cohort ’18 by providing a brief overview of its origins, objectives, design and potential.

Few middle-aged and elderly people get enough exercise from sports or leisure-time physical activity. Therefore, the impact of everyday physical activity on health is a matter of interest. The main objective of this study was to establish whether bicycle use in everyday life is positively associated with health. A sample of 982 randomly selected men and 1,020 women age 50–70 were asked in a computer-assisted telephone interview to provide information including a self-assessment of their health and physical activity. Self-assessed health correlates positively with bicycle use in everyday life (OR = 1.257; 95% CI: 1.031–1.532). Likewise, people who regularly cycle for transport are less likely to have medical risk factors (OR = 0.794; 95% CI: 0.652–0.967). This negative correlation is not diminished when sporting activity is controlled for. This indicates that positive effects of physical activity on risk factors can be also achieved solely by integrating more physical activity into routine everyday life.

In this paper is introduced a low power design technique for developing more reliable, functional, and more cost-effective handheld cellular telephones, portable computers, and peripherals. The portability requirements of handheld computers and other portable devices have placed tremendous pressure on electronic equipment designers, who need to deal with restrictions in the size of electronic units and power consumption. Even though battery technology is continuously improving, including reduced power consumption of processors and displays, extensive and continuous use of network services aggravates these issues. Now the onus is on the research and industrial communities to extend battery life and reduce weight. Equally, research on new techniques and technologies continues, to carefully manage energy consumption in mobile devices, while still providing continuous and fast connections to services and applications. This paper also discusses the novel trends in the developments and advancements in the area of low power Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design, dynamic power dissipation static power loss in Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS), and advanced low power technique. Though low power as a well-established domain that undergone lots of developments from transistor sizing, process shrinkage, voltage scaling, clock gating, etc., to adiabatic logic are elaborated.

As the core of automotive engine control system, carrying out intelligence research for ECU’s own intellectual property rights is necessary. In the foundation of combining domestic actual and analysis and summary to the existing system, we propose the design proposal of motor car engine intelligence electron controller based on CANBUS, and exposit how the factors of human, automobile, environment and so on to be coordinated to achieve optimal performance of overall system. By computer communication and network technology, seamlessly integration of GPS navigation system, radio telephone and bus distributed network can be realized, which enables the entire automobile electron system have the ability of data fusion, failure diagnosis and certain self-repair ability. ECU has huge potential commercial profit, because it uses field bus technology so that cable quantity in automobile was reduced greatly, and the field bus uses pure digital technique so that many measuring appliances and equipments can be connected on single electric cable to transmit more information, in addition, it has stronger interference immunity, lower cost of installment, running and maintenance. This system can coordinate with transportation automatic monitoring visual system, and it’s the key link to realize intelligence transportation system.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has been recently one of the more popular applications in Internet technology. It benefits lower cost of equipment, operation, and better integration with data applications than voice communications over telephone networks. However, the voice packets delivered over the Internet are not protected. The session initiation protocol (SIP) is widely used signaling protocol that controls communications on the Internet, typically using hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) digest authentication, which is vulnerable to many forms of attacks. This paper proposes a new secure authentication and key agreement scheme based on Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) named (ECDSA). Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme can resist various attacks and it can be applied to authenticate the users with different SIP domains.

Planning appointments has become a daunting task especially for health professionals in hospitals and clinics. Failure of appointment appointments can also result in dispersed appointments, increased number of shows, general patient dissatisfaction and financial losses for health organizations. Many day-to-day medical centers now use a combination of telephone-based planning and computer-based appointments but there is still a technical and human error gap. This online facility can add power to any hospital or clinic website. Reduces the hard work associated with managing a medical environment. More time to commit to patient care, better patient compliance and financial efficiency are other rewards. The integration of covid time, technology and rapid population growth has been strongly driven to introduce patient planning online. In this used project, you sometimes experience minor problems where you need to consult a doctor about your health problems or nearby and follow their meetings. The Online Doctor System will provide one authorized direct communication between the doctors of your choice if necessary for your minor problems. Using the web Online Healthcare System, patients will be able to complete online forms in seconds before entering the virtual office room. It will also allow you to upload your lab results such as x-ray copies, medical history etc which your doctors may refer you for.

The article presents the results of empirical research carried out in December 2020 among 59 elderly people – participants of activities organized by The Communal Home of Mutual Aid "POMOST" in Olsztyn. During the research, the method of Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) was used. The main research problem was focused on the question: how do the participants of the activities organised by The Communal Home of Mutual Aid „POMOST” in Olsztyn cope with the forced isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic? The statements of the surveyed elderly people show that they have knowledge about the pandemic, which they learn mainly from the mass media. Half of them feel anxious about the pandemic. Due to limited interpersonal contacts, they contact family and friends mainly by phone. During the forced isolation caused by the closure of the institution, the respondents report that they lack special events, various types of games, physical exercises and music classes, which are a form of therapy and enable social integration with other participants. Respondents need support in shopping and visiting a doctor, as well as in everyday activities. Most of them have telehealth consultations with a doctor, they also have access to the e-prescription service. More than one in three respondents took the vaccine against the coronavirus, but almost the same number of respondents do not want to be vaccinated.

Objective- Based on Sheth's (1983) integrative theory of patronage preference as the central theoretical framework, this paper examines religious influences on grocery shoppers' behavioural intentions in Mauritius. Methodology/Technique- Using stratified random sampling method a 5 point-Likert scale questionnaire was administered. Data from the random sample of 409 grocery shoppers was obtained by a computer aided telephone interview. The sample consisted of 202 Hindus, 71 Muslims and 136 Catholics represent the religious proportion of the Mauritian population. Findings- Results indicate that religious commitment significantly influences store loyalty, and complaint intentions, but have no significant impact on price sensitivity. Religious affiliation was found to have an impact on complaint intentions only. Understanding how to attract more loyal customers should be an underlying strategy for store managers rather than focusing on short-term profits. Novelty- Future research should consider how religious commitment mediates self-congruity, trust, commitment and satisfaction and their influence on behavioural intentions. This research is limited as it only considers the behavioural intentions of grocery shoppers in Mauritius. These findings address the gap in the religion domain and shed light on the value of religiosity wherein the market is highly religious as a potential marketing segmentation tool when formulating marketing tactics and implementing marketing strategies. Type of Paper- Empirical Keywords- Complaint, Price, Store Loyalty, Religious Affiliation, Religious Commitment.

Intelligent and Cooperative Information Systems (ICIS) will have large numbers of distributed, heterogeneous agents interacting and cooperating to solve problems regardless of location, original mission, or platform. The agents in an ICIS will adapt to new and possibly surprising situations, preferably without human intervention. These systems will not only control a domain, but also will improve their own performance over time, that is, they will learn. This paper describes five heterogeneous learning agents and how they are integrated into an Integrated Learning System (ILS) where some of the agents cooperate to improve performance. The issues involve coordinating distributed, cooperating, heterogeneous problem-solvers, combining various learning paradigms, and integrating different reasoning techniques. ILS also includes a central controller, called The Learning Coordinator (TLC), that manages the control of flow and communication among the agents, using a high-level communication protocol. In order to demonstrate the generality of the ILS architecture, we implemented an application which, through its own experience, learns how to control the traffic in a telephone network, and show the results for one set of experiments. Options for enhancements of the ILS architecture are also discussed.

BackgroundNHS 111 represents a fundamental change in the way that urgent care is delivered. It is underpinned by a computer decision support system (CDSS) and involves significant labour substitution, in particular the greater use of non-clinical staff to deliver services.ObjectiveTo investigate four core features of health-care innovation and change in relation to the new NHS 111 telephone-based service for 24/7 access to urgent care, namely the way in whichworkandworkforceare organised for this new service and how thetechnologyandorganisational contextshape the way in which services are delivered.DesignComparative mixed-methods case study of NHS 111 providers.SettingsFive NHS 111 sites, characterised by differences in organisational size, form and ethos and in the type of workforce employed and professional roles and skill mix.MethodsThe study combined ethnographic and survey methods. Non-participant observation was conducted at NHS 111 call centres and their linked urgent care centre(s) (UCCs; a total of 356 hours). Six focus groups were conducted with 47 call advisers, clinicians and organisational managers. An online survey was administered to call centre and UCC staff (n = 745) to ask their views about NHS 111; trust in NHS Pathways; and communication and information sharing (response rate: 41% for call centre staff, 35% for UCC staff).ResultsClinical assessment by call advisers is characterised by high levels of communication (including negotiation, communication and translation) and ‘emotion’ work, extending the work beyond simple operation of a CDSS. At most sites clinical advisers supported call advisers in clinical assessment but also played an important role in managing and sanctioning dispositions, notably emergency ambulance dispositions. Clinicians at UCCs have experienced a loss of control over their everyday work, which is now shaped by call centre workers. The Directory of Services, which provides information about locally available services, is key to delivering an integrated urgent care system. Trust in the CDSS is higher amongst call advisers than amongst clinical staff but there is widespread belief that the CDSS is risk averse. Staff often develop workarounds to ‘make the technology work’. There is considerable variation in how NHS 111 is organised and delivered, shaped by the organisational history and the professional culture of the organisations involved. Some sites were driven more by rationing and systemising, pursuing the NHS 111 vision of ‘right care, right place, right time’, whereas others were driven more by an ethos of what they perceived was a more patient-centred service.ConclusionsNHS 111 is primarily founded on a network of different organisations providing different aspects of the service. This network is primarily enabled through technological integration. Successful integration also requires understanding and trusting relationships between different providers, which were lacking in some sites. Underpinning NHS 111 with non-clinical workers offers significant opportunities for workforce reconfiguration, but this is not a simple substitution of labour (i.e. non-clinical staff replacing clinical staff). There is a significant organisational structure that is necessary to support and ‘keep in place’ both the CDSS itself and non-clinical workers using the CDSS.FundingThe National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme.

BackgroundImproving the quality of mental health care requires integrating successful research interventions into ‘real-world’ practice settings. Coordinated Anxiety Learning and Management (CALM) is a treatment-delivery model for anxiety disorders encountered in primary care. CALM offers cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), medication, or both; non-expert care managers assisting primary care clinicians with adherence promotion and medication optimization; computer-assisted CBT delivery; and outcome monitoring. This study describes incremental benefits, costs and net benefits of CALM versus usual care (UC).MethodThe CALM randomized, controlled effectiveness trial was conducted in 17 primary care clinics in four US cities from 2006 to 2009. Of 1062 eligible patients, 1004 English- or Spanish-speaking patients aged 18–75 years with panic disorder (PD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social anxiety disorder (SAD) and/or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with or without major depression were randomized. Anxiety-free days (AFDs), quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and expenditures for out-patient visits, emergency room (ER) visits, in-patient stays and psychiatric medications were estimated based on blinded telephone assessments at baseline, 6, 12 and 18 months.ResultsOver 18 months, CALM participants, on average, experienced 57.1 more AFDs [95% confidence interval (CI) 31–83] and $245 additional medical expenses (95% CI $–733 to $1223). The mean incremental net benefit (INB) of CALM versus UC was positive when an AFD was valued ⩾$4. For QALYs based on the Short-Form Health Survey-12 (SF-12) and the EuroQol EQ-5D, the mean INB was positive at ⩾$5000.ConclusionsCompared with UC, CALM provides significant benefits with modest increases in health-care expenditures.

We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as STATEMENT, Question, BACKCHANNEL, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody, and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of 35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the orientations of collaborative networks (CNs) for managing integrated information flow. It seeks to analyse and shed light into the main priorities of firms for sharing and coordinating information with CN partners. These priorities are needed to enhance practices to trade-off and integrate flows where appropriate for maximising profits and performance. Design/methodology/approach – In this study, inductive multiple-case logic is applied to research how six industrial firms manage integrated information flow in relation to their collaborative networked organisations (CNOs). Guided by an interpretivism epistemology, 22 face-to-face and 13 telephonic semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 key informants in six industrial firms. Interview data were analysed in line with the research agenda to understand orientations for integrated information flow. Findings – The research finds that CN management is enhanced when flow integration for industrial firms is skill, project, agreement and relationship oriented. The investigation also finds that CNO flow integration could be enhanced when industrial firms confront and prioritise schemes for fluidity prevention, systematised templates, procedural prompts, implementation checklists, confidence building, issuance policies and concern separation. Originality/value – The major contribution of this paper is an exposition on priorities for integrated information flow within CNs. It also offers insights that suggest industrial firms can boost the performance of their CNOs by: working in small knit highly skilled teams, tactically implementing manufacturability and marketability programmes, strategising their production contracts and strengthening their company-customer-supplier ties.

The COVID-19 epidemic surprised economic operators around the world. The very existence of many businesses, and thus jobs, was at stake. However, one year after the WHO declared the outbreak a pandemic, contrary to the pessimistic forecasts of business analysts, some industries did not experience the predicted negative effects of the crisis. This article presents the results of a pilot study on micro and small enterprises in the rubber products industry in Poland during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the aim of analyzing the phenomenon of sustainable resource management that led not only to the survival of these enterprises but also to a significant increase in their turnover. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to analyze the key success factors of the indicated economic entities, with particular emphasis on the perspective of sustainable resource management and relationship management. On the basis of best research practices, a triangulation of research methods was applied (integrative literature review, computer-assisted telephone interviewing, and individual in-depth interview). A relationship was observed between the sustainable management of resources and the structure of the relationship network and the strength of its connections. In micro and small enterprises in the rubber products sector in Poland, sustainable resource management is related to the structure of the network of relations and the strength of connections in the network (relations/networking), as enterprises form a group of entities with a high level of loyalty, especially between the suppliers and buyers of raw materials. The formulated conclusions will become the basis for further in-depth research that can be conducted (a) in the same group of respondents, but using a representative research group, (b) in the same industry among a group of large enterprises, and (c) in a group of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from other industries.

AbstractServitization in developed countries is an increasingly popular strategy for building a competitive advantage. Its level varies depending on different market conditions as well as between sectors. The Polish economy is that of a developed country, but still, its level of development is slightly lower compared to the most developed countries. The current state of knowledge indicates that the machinery manufacturing sector usually characterises the highest level of servitization in comparison to other manufacturing sectors. To the author’s knowledge, no study on the servitization of Polish manufacturing companies has been conducted. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to fill the gap by analysing and evaluating the level of servitization in manufacturing companies operating in the Polish market. Aiming to assess whether the Polish manufacturers follow the global trends of servitization, the questionnaire survey was conducted with 150 machinery manufacturers operating in the Polish market. The survey was performed using the Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) technique between May and July of 2018. The results showed that in surveyed companies, the level of servitization, which was assessed based on a range of the most frequently provided services, was rather low. Although most manufacturers offer services to their customers, these services mostly support their products, and the revenue derived from the services constitutes a comparatively small part of the company’s total revenue. This paper makes two types of contribution to the development of research in the field of servitization. First, the study on the servitization of the Polish manufacturing companies revealed that in a country with the well-developed economy, industrial enterprises still rely on manufacturing rather than service delivery. And the potential for services is not yet recognised. Secondly, the original model for classifying the level of product and service integration in the activity of a manufacturing company is proposed. The model requires empirical verification and further studies. Nevertheless, it stands for a theoretical contribution to the research field of servitization.

Background Widespread adoption, use, and integration of patient-facing technologies into the workflow of health care systems has been slow, thus limiting the realization of their potential. A growing body of work has focused on how best to promote adoption and use of these technologies and measure their impacts on processes of care and outcomes. This body of work currently suffers from limitations (eg, cross-sectional analyses, limited patient-generated data linked with clinical records) and would benefit from institutional infrastructure to enhance available data and integrate the voice of the patient into implementation and evaluation efforts. Objective The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has launched an initiative called the Veterans Engagement with Technology Collaborative cohort to directly address these challenges. This paper reports the process by which the cohort was developed and describes the baseline data being collected from cohort members. The overarching goal of the Veterans Engagement with Technology Collaborative cohort is to directly engage veterans in the evaluation of new VHA patient-facing technologies and in so doing, to create new infrastructure to support related quality improvement and evaluation activities. Methods Inclusion criteria for veterans to be eligible for membership in the cohort included being an active user of VHA health care services, having a mobile phone, and being an established user of existing VHA patient-facing technologies as represented by use of the secure messaging feature of VHA’s patient portal. Between 2017 and 2018, we recruited veterans who met these criteria and administered a survey to them over the telephone. Results The majority of participants (N=2727) were male (2268/2727, 83.2%), White (2226/2727, 81.6%), living in their own apartment or house (2519/2696, 93.4%), and had completed some college (1176/2701, 43.5%) or an advanced degree (1178/2701, 43.6%). Cohort members were 59.9 years old, on average. The majority self-reported their health status as being good (1055/2725, 38.7%) or very good (524/2725, 19.2%). Most cohort members owned a personal computer (2609/2725, 95.7%), tablet computer (1616/2716, 59.5%), and/or smartphone (2438/2722, 89.6%). Conclusions The Veterans Engagement with Technology Collaborative cohort is an example of a VHA learning health care system initiative designed to support the data-driven implementation of patient-facing technologies into practice and measurement of their impacts. With this initiative, VHA is building capacity for future, rapid, rigorous evaluation and quality improvement efforts to enhance understanding of the adoption, use, and impact of patient-facing technologies.

Purpose Drivers, travellers/tourists, pedestrians, paramedical officers, road safety officers, police officers and other security agencies in emergency times in developing countries are often challenged. The purpose of this paper is to explore the intervention of a quick mobile contact called “My Contact Person” (MCP) during such emergencies. Design/methodology/approach This study used a quantitative research method to collect data. The research tool is a researcher-made questionnaire with items developed using the five innovation dimensions and domestication. The data was analyzed with SmartPLS 3.0 software. The reliability values were above the postulated demarcation of 0.7, while the average variance extracted conforms to the norm of 0.5. The study participants were mobile phone users who own and use a mobile phone. Owing to the study’s nature, a simple random sampling technique was used to appraise 196 respondents across Nigeria’s demography. Findings The results show that the mobile users in a developing context are willing to observe “MCP’s” efficacy before they try to appropriate it to their daily lifestyle. Further, “MCP’s” compatibility with the telephone user is an antecedent of its relative advantages over the existing telephone lists. The results reveal that the respondents perceived integrating and adapting “MCP” to their daily lives as a complicated process. In this study, most participants did not regard observability and trialability as a means of appropriating MCP to their daily lifestyle. Research limitations/implications This paper’s findings’ generalizability is limited because the present study was conducted using two higher education institutions (HEI) with a relatively small sample in Nigeria. Probing MCP domestication in more institutions and other communities, as significant communities’ aside HEI use mobile phones will increase our research findings’ generalizability. A parallel investigation of a range of developed and developing countries should be explored to ascertain mobile phone users’ perceptions across context. Practical implications This study has several implications for citizens, especially in the developing world. MCP will provide quick contact opportunities to loved ones of the traumatized, saving lives by significantly avoiding worry, fear, anxiety and depression. MCP also has the potential of increasing input needs to be undertaken to accelerate the appropriate use of digital technology by health-care consumers, including enhancing education and technological literacy and providing access to low-cost digital technology. Originality/value “MCP” will be a quick intervention for drivers, travellers/tourists, pedestrians, paramedical officers, road safety officers, police officers and other security agencies in the time of emergency. For the managers, the relative advantage is the preferable factor to create awareness for “MCP”, while observability needs more effort to persuade the mobile phone users to accept and use MCP.

Background Older adults desire to stay independent at home for as long as possible. We developed an interactive website to inform older adults and caregivers about ways to achieve this. Objective This study aimed to perform an in-depth exploration among potential end users about how to improve the interactive website to better inform older adults and caregivers about ways to stay independent at home. Methods To complement the results of a quantitative survey on the usability and acceptability of the website before implementation, we conducted a qualitative descriptive study. Using multiple recruitment strategies, we recruited a purposeful sample of older adults (aged ≥65 years) and caregivers of older adults struggling to stay independent at home. We conducted face-to-face or telephonic interviews in either English or French. In addition, we collected sociodemographic characteristics, other characteristics of participants (eg, health, digital profile, and perception of retirement homes), and experiences with using the website (factors facilitating the use of the website, barriers to its use, and suggestions for improvement). Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analyzed by two researchers. Results We recruited 15 participants, including 5 older adults (mean age 75 years, SD 6) and 10 caregivers (mean age 57 years, SD 14). The mean interview time was 32 min (SD 14). Most older adults had either mobility or health problems or both, and many of them were receiving home care services (eg, blood pressure measurement and body care). Overall, participants found the website easy to navigate using a computer, reassuring, and useful for obtaining information. Barriers were related to navigation (eg, difficult to navigate with a cellphone), relevance (eg, no specific section for caregivers), realism (eg, some resources presented are not state funded), understandability (eg, the actors’ accents were difficult to understand), and accessibility (eg, not adapted for low digital literacy). Suggestions for improvement included a needs assessment section to direct users to the support appropriate to their needs, addition of information about moving into residential care, a section for caregivers, distinction between state-provided and private support services, simpler language, expansion of content to be relevant to all of Canada, and video subtitles for the hearing impaired. Conclusions Users provided a wealth of information about the needs of older adults who were facing a loss of autonomy and about what such a website could usefully provide. The request for less generic and more personalized information reflects the wide range of needs that electronic health innovations, such as our interactive website, need to address. After integrating the changes suggested, the new website—Support for Older Adults to Stay Independent at Home (SUSTAIN)—will be implemented and made available to better assist older adults and caregivers in staying independent at home.

As its first issue was published in 1989, the Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics (JRM) has been in existence for 30 years. Its entrance into its fourth decade this year coincides with the change in the name of the Japanese era, marking a joyous milestone. During the three decades since the JRM was founded, much progress has been made in the areas covered by it, and these areas have expanded to encompass very diverse fields. It was around 1988, when I was at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), that I received a letter from Kazuo Yamafuji, later the first Editor-in-Chief of the editorial board, stressing the need for a journal such as the JRM. I gladly joined the committee to discuss its publication, and after attending a few meetings, I witnessed its successful launch. I served as the Deputy Editorin- Chief of the editorial board. Prior to that time, robots had mainly inhabited the world of science fiction and were not recognized as a technological subject within an academic discipline, except in the field of factory automation. The robots that did exist were usually thought of in a recreational context. Meanwhile, the general trend in academic and engineering disciplines was toward specialization and segmentation, with engineering splitting into mechanical, electronic, and other branches, each becoming progressively isolated from the others. Yet, those working in areas related to product development and manufacturing were expected not only to have knowledge of several engineering disciplines but also to integrate them in applying them. These engineers/technicians were treated as unoriginal emulators existing outside of the conventional systematized and specialized fields, and they were regarded as heretics with no suitable field to represent in making presentations at professional or academic conferences. Even if they hoped to publicize their research findings, there were no professional/academic journals that could provide a proper peer review. It was under these circumstances that the word “mechatronics” was coined in Japan, where it gained currency and also came to earn some recognition in the English-speaking world. Founded at just the right time, the JRM contributed to the spread and growth of mechatronics. Subsequently, the term came to denote, in addition to its original meaning of the integration of mechanics, electronics, and information science, the fusion of widely diverse technologies in human sciences, social sciences, and medicine. In this context, it is my ardent hope that the JRM, in its fourth decade, will increase its presence as a journal that remains unconstrained by conventional specialties and accepts papers and articles that deal with as-yet-unestablished areas that cross multiple fields, contributing to their dissemination. At the time the JRM was founded, Keiji Hayashi was president of Fuji Technology Press Ltd., the organization that annually presents the JRM Best Paper Award. Unfortunately, he passed away at the age of 90 on March 19, 2017, before he could see the JRM’s 30th anniversary. Some time before he passed, he telephoned me to say that he hoped the JRM would continue to widely encompass and nurture as-yet-unknown areas. On this occasion of the 30th anniversary of the JRM, I wish to pay my respects and express my deep gratitude to Mr. Hayashi, who provided his own funds to support its publication. I pray that his soul may rest in peace, and I sincerely hope that the JRM continues to make great strides in the coming decade.Masanori Idesawa

The development of information technology is very dynamic, in particular, actively developing computer networks, which are increasingly used for telephone conversations. Recently, there has been increased interest in IP-telephony technologies, in other words PBX, the use of which can significantly reduce the cost of telephone communication within the company. PBX (Private Branch exchange) is a system of devices that provides automatic connection and support of telephone communication between subscribers of this PBX, who use special end devices — telephones. A virtual PBX is a powerful telephone system that uses an Internet connection as opposed to standard telephone services. A standard PBX is used to transfer calls from the Internet to a public telephone switching network. Virtual PBX can be considered as a more economical version, because no equipment is involved, everything is virtual and hosted by the service provider. Currently, the open communication platform Asterisk occupies almost 85% of the open source PBX market. The Asterisk automatic telephone exchange supports both IP-telephony protocols and traditional communication lines. All basic and advanced PBX functions are supported: voice menu, call recording, call statistics, voicemail, queuing and operator distribution. Video communication is directly supported. The latest versions of Asterisk support call encryption. Asterisk has simple and well-documented interfaces for integration with other systems, making it easy to embed communications in business processes and business applications. There are a large number of various graphical tools for administering Asterisk, both paid and free, among which the most popular is the free WEB interface FreePBX.

The integration of technology into the classroom is a major issue in education today. Many national and provincial initiatives specify the technology skills that students must demonstrate at each grade level. The Government of the Province of Alberta in Canada, has mandated the implementation of a new curriculum which began in September of 2000, called Information and Communication Technology. This curriculum is infused within core courses and specifies what students are “expected to know, be able to do, and be like with respect to technology” (Alberta Learning, 2000). Since teachers are required to implement this new curriculum, school jurisdictions are turning to professional development strategies and hiring standards to upgrade teachers’ computer skills to meet this goal. This paper summarizes the results of a telephone survey administered to all public school jurisdictions in the Province of Alberta with a 100% response rate. We examined the computer skills that school jurisdictions require of newly hired teachers, and the support strategies employed for currently employed teachers.

Objective: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the major mental health outcomes on dementia patient carers when using psychoeducational programs and psychotherapeutic interventions.Methods: A meta-analysis was performed with randomized controlled trials of carers' tele-health interventions from the literature inception to December 31, 2019, using PubMed, EMBASE, and CENTRAL databases for articles.Results: The meta-analysis identified 1,043 results, of which 11 were randomized control trials. Among all 11 randomized control trials, only one study addressed face-to-face contact with online modules of interventions, four studies addressed telephone-based interventions, two studies reported on combined face-to-face contact and phone call interventions, two studies focused on web-based interventions, one study used video and telephone interventions, and one study conducted a computer-telephone integration system of intervention. The updated evidence suggested that there was more efficacy via tele-health interventions in lowering depression for carers of people with dementia. We outlined the delivery formation of intervention to evaluate the effectiveness and processes of major mental health improvements, including depression, burden, anxiety, and quality of life.Conclusions: In this study, tele-health intervention was shown to significantly lower depression and also lower the risk of mental health impairment. Although there was a significant decrease of depression, there were no significant differences in burden, anxiety, and quality of life. Future researchers are encouraged to carry out larger-scale studies; also, further analysis using a standardized assessment tool is suggested for future multi-component tele-health interventions.

There’s no reason to think that Jesus wouldn’t have Facebooked or twittered if he came into the world now. Can you imagine his killer status updates? Reverend Schenck, New York, All Saints Episcopal Church (Mapes) The fundamental problem of religious communication is how best to represent and mediate the sacred. (O’Leary 787) What would Jesus tweet? Historically, the quest for sacred connections has relied on the mediation of faith communication via technological implements, from the use of the drum to mediate the Divine, to the use of the mechanical clock by monks as reminders to observe the canonical hours of prayer (Mumford). Today, religious communication practices increasingly implicate Web 2.0, or interactive, user-generated content like blogs (Cheong, Halavis & Kwon), and microblogs like “tweets” of no more than 140 characters sent via Web-based applications like text messaging, instant messaging, e-mail, or on the Web. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s latest report in October 2009, 19% of online adults said that they used a microblogging service to send messages from a computer or mobile device to family and friends who have signed up to receive them (Fox, Zickuhr & Smith). The ascendency of microblogging leads to interesting questions of how new media use alters spatio-temporal dynamics in peoples’ everyday consciousness, including ways in which tweeting facilitates ambient religious interactions. The notion of ambient strikes a particularly resonant chord for religious communication: many faith traditions advocate the practice of sacred mindfulness, and a consistent piety in light of holy devotion to an omnipresent and omniscient Divine being. This paper examines how faith believers appropriate the emergent microblogging practices to create an encompassing cultural surround to include microblogging rituals which promote regular, heightened prayer awareness. Faith tweets help constitute epiphany and a persistent sense of sacred connected presence, which in turn rouses an identification of a higher moral purpose and solidarity with other local and global believers. Amidst ongoing tensions about microblogging, religious organisations and their leadership have also begun to incorporate Twitter into their communication practices and outreach, to encourage the extension of presence beyond the church walls. Faith Tweeting and Mobile Mediated Prayers Twitter’s Website describes itself as a new media service that help users communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to the question, “What are you doing?” Some evangelical Christian groups harness these coincident messaging flows to create meaningful pathways for personal, intercessory and synchronised prayer. Using hashtags in a Twitter post creates a community convention or grouping around faith ideas and allows others to access them. Popular faith related hashtags include #twurch (Twitter + church), #prayer, #JIL (Jesus is Lord) and #pray4 (as in, #pray4 my mother). Just as mobile telephony assists distal family members to build “connected presence” (Christensen), I suggest that faith tweets stimulating mobile mediated prayers help build a sense of closeness and “religious connected presence” amongst the distributed family of faith believers, to recreate and reaffirm Divine and corporeal bonds. Consider the Calvin Institute of Worship’s set up of six different Twitter feeds to “pray the hours”. Praying the hours is an ancient practice of praying set prayers throughout certain times of the day, as marked in the Book of Common Prayer in the Christian tradition. Inspired by the Holy Scripture’s injunction to “pray without ceasing” ( 1 Thessalonians 5:17), users can sign up to receive hourly personal or intercessory prayers sent in brief verses or view a Tweetgrid with prayer feeds, to prompt continuous prayer or help those who are unsure of what words to pray. In this way, contemporary believers may reinvent the century-old practice of constant faith mediation as Twitter use helps to reintegrate scripture into people’s daily lives. Faith tweets that goad personal and intercessory prayer also makes ambient religious life salient, and preserves self-awareness of sanctified moments during normal, everyday activities. Furthermore, while the above “praying the hours” performance promotes a specific integration of scripture or prayer into individuals’ daily rhythms, other faith tweets are more focused on evangelism: to reach others through recurrent prayers or random inspirational messages sent throughout the day. For instance, as BBC News reports, religious leaders such as Cardinal Brady, head of Ireland’s Catholic Church, encourage parishioners to use Twitter to spread “the gift of prayer”, as they microblog their daily prayers for their friends and family. Cardinal Brady commented that, “such a sea of prayer is sure to strengthen our sense of solidarity with one another and remind us those who receive them that others really do care" (emphasis mine). Indeed, Cardinal Brady’s observation is instructive to the “Twitness” of faithful microbloggers who desire to shape the blogosphere, and create new faith connections. “JesusTweeters” is a faith-based social networking site, and a service which allows users to send out messages from any random tweet from the Bible Tweet Library, or their own personal messages on a scheduled basis. The site reports that over 500 members of JesusTweeters, each with an average of 500 followers, have signed up to help “spread the Word” worldwide through Twitter. This is an interesting emergent form of Twitter action, as it translates to more than 2.5 million faith tweets being circulated online daily. Moreover, Twitter encourages ‘connected presence’ whereby the use of microblogging enables online faith believers to enjoy an intimate, ‘always on’ virtual presence with their other congregational members during times of physical absence. In the recently released e-book The Reason Your Church Must Twitter, subtitled Making Your Ministry Contagious, author and self-proclaimed ‘technology evangelist’ Anthony Coppedge advocates churches to adopt Twitter as part of their overall communication strategy to maintain relational connectedness beyond the boundaries of established institutional practices. In his book, Coppedge argues that Twitter can be used as a “megaphone” for updates and announcements or as a “conversation” to spur sharing of ideas and prayer exchanges. In line with education scholars who promote Twitter as a pedagogical tool to enhance free-flowing interactions outside of the classroom (Dunlap & Lowenthal), Coppedge encourages pastors to tweet “life application points” from their sermons to their congregational members throughout the week, to reinforce the theme of their Sunday lesson. Ministry leaders are also encouraged to adopt Twitter to “become highly accessible” to members and communicate with their volunteers, in order to build stronger ecumenical relationships. Communication technology scholar Michele Jackson notes that Twitter is a form of visible “lifelogging” as interactants self-disclose their lived-in moments (731). In the case of faith tweets, co-presence is constructed when instantaneous Twitter updates announce new happenings on the church campus, shares prayer requests, confirms details of new events and gives public commendations to celebrate victories of staff members. In this way, microblogging helps to build a portable church where fellow believers can connect to each-other via the thread of frequent, running commentaries of their everyday lives. To further develop ‘connected presence’, a significant number of Churches have also begun to incorporate real-time Twitter streams during their Sunday services. For example, to stimulate congregational members’ sharing of their spontaneous reactions to the movement of the Holy Spirit, Westwind Church in Michigan has created a dozen “Twitter Sundays” where members are free to tweet at any time and at any worship service (Rochman). At Woodlands Church in Houston, a new service was started in 2009 which encourages parishioners to tweet their thoughts, reflections and questions throughout the service. The tweets are reviewed by church staff and they are posted as scrolling visual messages on a screen behind the pastor while he preaches (Patel). It is interesting to note that recurring faith tweets spatially filling the sanctuary screens blurs the visual hierarchies between the pastor as foreground and congregations as background to the degree that tweet voices from the congregation are blended into the church worship service. The interactive use of Twitter also differs from the forms of personal silent meditation and private devotional prayer that, traditionally, most liturgical church services encourage. In this way, key to new organisational practices within religious organisations is what some social commentators are now calling “ambient intimacy”, an enveloping social awareness of one’s social network (Pontin). Indeed, several pastors have acknowledged that faith tweets have enabled them to know their congregational members’ reflections, struggles and interests better and thus they are able to improve their teaching and caring ministry to meet congregants’ evolving spiritual needs (Mapes).Microblogging Rituals and Tweeting Tensions In many ways, faith tweets can be comprehended as microblogging rituals which have an ambient quality in engendering individuals’ spiritual self and group consciousness. The importance of examining emergent cyber-rituals is underscored by Stephen O’Leary in his 1996 seminal article on Cyberspace as Sacred Space. Writing in an earlier era of digital connections, O’Leary discussed e-mail and discussion forum cyber-rituals and what ritual gains in the virtual environment aside from its conventional physiological interactions. Drawing from Walter Ong’s understanding of the “secondary orality” accompanying the shift to electronic media, he argued that cyber-ritual as performative utterances restructure and reintegrate the minds and emotions of their participants, such that they are more aware of their interior self and a sense of communal group membership. Here, the above illustrative examples show how Twitter functions as the context for contemporary, mediated ritual practices to help believers construct a connected presence and affirm their religious identities within an environment where wired communication is a significant part of everyday life. To draw from Walter Ong’s words, microblogging rituals create a new textual and visual “sensorium” that has insightful implications for communication and media scholars. Faith tweeting by restructuring believers’ consciousness and generating a heightened awareness of relationship between the I, You and the Thou opens up possibilities for community building and revitalised religiosity to counteract claims of secularisation in technologically advanced and developed countries. “Praying the hours” guided by scripturally inspired faith tweets, for example, help seekers and believers experience epiphany and practice their faith in a more holistic way as they de-familarize mundane conditions and redeem a sense of the sacred from their everyday surrounds. Through the intermittent sharing of intercessory prayer tweets, faithful followers enact prayer chains and perceive themselves to be immersed in invariable spiritual battle to ward off evil ideology or atheistic beliefs. Moreover, the erosion of the authority of the church is offset by changed leadership practices within religious organisations which have experimented and actively incorporated Twitter into their daily institutional practices. To the extent that laity are willing to engage, creative practices to encourage congregational members to tweet during and after the service help revivify communal sentiments and a higher moral purpose through identification and solidarity with clergy leaders and other believers. Yet this ambience has its possible drawbacks as some experience tensions in their perception and use of Twitter as new technology within the church. Microblogging rituals may have negative implications for individual believers and religious organisations as they can weaken or pervert the existing relational links. As Pauline Cheong and Jessie Poon have pointed out, use of the Internet within religious organisations may bring about an alternative form of “perverse religious social capital building” as some clergy view that online communication detracts from real time relations and physical rituals. Indeed, some religious leaders have already articulated their concerns about Twitter and new tensions they experience in balancing the need to engage with new media audiences and the need for quiet reflection that spiritual rites such as confession of sins and the Holy Communion entail. According to the critics of faith tweeting, microblogging is time consuming and contributes to cognitive overload by taking away one’s attention to what is noteworthy at the moment. For Pastor Hayes of California for example, Twitter distracts his congregation’s focus on the sermon and thus he only recommends his members to tweet after the service. In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, he said: “If two people are talking at the same time, somebody’s not listening”, and “You cannot do two things at once and expect you’re not going to miss something” (Patel). Furthermore, similar to prior concerns voiced with new technologies, there are concerns over inappropriate tweet content that can comprise of crudity, gossip, malevolent and hate messages, which may be especially corrosive to faith communities that strive to model virtues like love, temperance and truth-telling (Vitello). In turn, some congregational members are also experiencing frustrations as they negotiate church boundaries and other members’ disapproval of their tweeting practices during service and church events. Censure of microblogging has taken the form of official requests for tweeting members to leave the sanctuary, to less formal social critique and the application of peer pressure to halt tweeting during religious proceedings and activities (Mapes). As a result of these connectivity tensions, varying recommendations have been recently published as fresh efforts to manage religious communication taking place in ambience. For instance, Coppedge recommends every tweeting church to include Twitter usage in their “church communications policy” to promote accountability within the organisation. The policy should include guidelines against excessive use of Twitter as spam, and for at least one leader to subscribe and monitor every Twitter account used. Furthermore, the Interpreter magazine of the United Methodist Church worldwide featured recommendations by Rev. Safiyah Fosua who listed eight important attributes for pastors wishing to incorporate Twitter during their worship services (Rice). These attributes are: highly adaptive; not easily distracted; secure in their presentation style; not easily taken aback when people appear to be focused on something other than listenin; into quality rather than volume; not easily rattled by things that are new; secure enough as a preacher to let God work through whatever is tweeted even if it is not the main points of the sermon; and carried on the same current the congregation is travelling on. For the most part, these attributes underscore how successful (read wired) contemporary religious leaders should be tolerant of ambient religious communication and of blurring hierarchies of information control when faced with microblogging and the “inexorable advance of multimodal connectedness” (Schroeder 1). To conclude, the rise of faith tweeting opens up a new portal to investigate accretive changes to culture as microblogging rituals nurture piety expressed in continuous prayer, praise and ecclesial updates. The emergent Twitter sensorium demonstrates the variety of ways in which religious adherents appropriate new media within the ken and tensions of their daily lives. References BBC News. “Twitter Your Prayer says Cardinal.” 27 April 2009. ‹http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8020285.stm›. Cheong, P.H., A. Halavis and K. Kwon. “The Chronicles of Me: Understanding Blogging as a Religious Practice. Journal of Media and Religion 7 (2008): 107-131. Cheong, P.H., and J.P.H. Poon. “‘WWW.Faith.Org’: (Re)structuring Communication and Social Capital Building among Religious Organizations.” Information, Communication and Society 11.1 (2008): 89-110. Christensen, Toke Haunstrup. “‘Connected Presence’ in Distributed Family Life.” New Media and Society 11 (2009): 433-451. Coppedge, Anthony. “The Reason Your Church Must Twitter: Making Your Ministry Contagious.” 2009. ‹http://www.twitterforchurches.com/›. Dunlap, Joanna, and Patrick Lowenthal. “Tweeting the Night Away: Using Twitter to Enhance Social Presence.” Journal of Information Systems Education 20.2 (2009): 129-135. Fox, Susannah, Kathryn Zickuhr, and Aaron Smith. “Twitter and Status Updating" Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2009. Oct. 2009 ‹http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2009/PIP_Twitter_Fall_2009_web.pdf›. Jackson, Michele. “The Mash-Up: A New Archetype for Communication.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14.3 (2009): 730-734. Mapes, Diane. “Holy Twitter! Tweeting from the Pews.” 2009. 3 June 2009 ‹http://www.nbcwashington.com/.../Holy_Twitter__Tweeting_from_the_pews.html›. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, 1934. Patel, Purva. “Tweeting during Church Services Gets Blessing of Pastors.” Houston Chronicle (2009). 10 Oct. 2009 ‹http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6662287.html›. O’Leary, Stephen. ”Cyberspace as Sacred Space: Communicating Religion on Computer Networks.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64.4 (1996): 781-808. Pontin, Jason. “Twitter and Ambient Intimacy: How Evan Williams Helped Create the New Social Medium of Microblogging.” MIT Review 2007. 15 Nov. 2009 ‹http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/19713/?a=f›. Rice, Kami. “The New Worship Question: To Tweet or Not to Tweet.” Interpreter Magazine (Nov.-Dec. 2009). ‹http://www.interpretermagazine.org/interior.asp?ptid=43&mid=13871›. Rochman, Bonnie. “Twittering in Church, with the Pastor’s O.K.” Time 3 May 2009. ‹http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1895463,00.html›. Schroeder, Ralph. “Mobile Phones and the Inexorable Advance of Multimodal Connectedness.” New Media and Society 12.1 (2010): 75-90. Vitello, Paul. “Lead Us to Tweet, and Forgive the Trespassers.” New York Times 5 July 2009. ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/technology/internet/05twitter.html›.

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944). It is worth revisiting the old boy’s grumpiness, because the rhetoric he so niftily skewers continues in our own time. Facebook features “Peace on Facebook” and even claims that it can “decrease world conflict” through inter-cultural communication. Twitter has announced itself as “a triumph of humanity” (“A Cyber-House” 61). Queue George. In between Orwell and latter-day hoody cybertarians, a whole host of excitable public intellectuals announced the impending end of materiality through emergent media forms. Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Daniel Bell, Ithiel de Sola Pool, George Gilder, Alvin Toffler—the list of 1960s futurists goes on and on. And this wasn’t just a matter of punditry: the OECD decreed the coming of the “information society” in 1975 and the European Union (EU) followed suit in 1979, while IBM merrily declared an “information age” in 1977. Bell theorized this technological utopia as post-ideological, because class would cease to matter (Mattelart). Polluting industries seemingly no longer represented the dynamic core of industrial capitalism; instead, market dynamism radiated from a networked, intellectual core of creative and informational activities. The new information and knowledge-based economies would rescue First World hegemony from an “insurgent world” that lurked within as well as beyond itself (Schiller). Orwell’s others and the Cold-War futurists propagated one of the most destructive myths shaping both public debate and scholarly studies of the media, culture, and communication. They convinced generations of analysts, activists, and arrivistes that the promises and problems of the media could be understood via metaphors of the environment, and that the media were weightless and virtual. The famous medium they wished us to see as the message —a substance as vital to our wellbeing as air, water, and soil—turned out to be no such thing. Today’s cybertarians inherit their anti-Marxist, anti-materialist positions, as a casual glance at any new media journal, culture-industry magazine, or bourgeois press outlet discloses. The media are undoubtedly important instruments of social cohesion and fragmentation, political power and dissent, democracy and demagoguery, and other fraught extensions of human consciousness. But talk of media systems as equivalent to physical ecosystems—fashionable among marketers and media scholars alike—is predicated on the notion that they are environmentally benign technologies. This has never been true, from the beginnings of print to today’s cloud-covered computing. Our new book Greening the Media focuses on the environmental impact of the media—the myriad ways that media technology consumes, despoils, and wastes natural resources. We introduce ideas, stories, and facts that have been marginal or absent from popular, academic, and professional histories of media technology. Throughout, ecological issues have been at the core of our work and we immodestly think the same should apply to media communications, and cultural studies more generally. We recognize that those fields have contributed valuable research and teaching that address environmental questions. For instance, there is an abundant literature on representations of the environment in cinema, how to communicate environmental messages successfully, and press coverage of climate change. That’s not enough. You may already know that media technologies contain toxic substances. You may have signed an on-line petition protesting the hazardous and oppressive conditions under which workers assemble cell phones and computers. But you may be startled, as we were, by the scale and pervasiveness of these environmental risks. They are present in and around every site where electronic and electric devices are manufactured, used, and thrown away, poisoning humans, animals, vegetation, soil, air and water. We are using the term “media” as a portmanteau word to cover a multitude of cultural and communications machines and processes—print, film, radio, television, information and communications technologies (ICT), and consumer electronics (CE). This is not only for analytical convenience, but because there is increasing overlap between the sectors. CE connect to ICT and vice versa; televisions resemble computers; books are read on telephones; newspapers are written through clouds; and so on. Cultural forms and gadgets that were once separate are now linked. The currently fashionable notion of convergence doesn’t quite capture the vastness of this integration, which includes any object with a circuit board, scores of accessories that plug into it, and a global nexus of labor and environmental inputs and effects that produce and flow from it. In 2007, a combination of ICT/CE and media production accounted for between 2 and 3 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted around the world (“Gartner Estimates,”; International Telecommunication Union; Malmodin et al.). Between twenty and fifty million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) are generated annually, much of it via discarded cell phones and computers, which affluent populations throw out regularly in order to buy replacements. (Presumably this fits the narcissism of small differences that distinguishes them from their own past.) E-waste is historically produced in the Global North—Australasia, Western Europe, Japan, and the US—and dumped in the Global South—Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southern and Southeast Asia, and China. It takes the form of a thousand different, often deadly, materials for each electrical and electronic gadget. This trend is changing as India and China generate their own media detritus (Robinson; Herat). Enclosed hard drives, backlit screens, cathode ray tubes, wiring, capacitors, and heavy metals pose few risks while these materials remain encased. But once discarded and dismantled, ICT/CE have the potential to expose workers and ecosystems to a morass of toxic components. Theoretically, “outmoded” parts could be reused or swapped for newer parts to refurbish devices. But items that are defined as waste undergo further destruction in order to collect remaining parts and valuable metals, such as gold, silver, copper, and rare-earth elements. This process causes serious health risks to bones, brains, stomachs, lungs, and other vital organs, in addition to birth defects and disrupted biological development in children. Medical catastrophes can result from lead, cadmium, mercury, other heavy metals, poisonous fumes emitted in search of precious metals, and such carcinogenic compounds as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, polyvinyl chloride, and flame retardants (Maxwell and Miller 13). The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency estimates that by 2007 US residents owned approximately three billion electronic devices, with an annual turnover rate of 400 million units, and well over half such purchases made by women. Overall CE ownership varied with age—adults under 45 typically boasted four gadgets; those over 65 made do with one. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) says US$145 billion was expended in the sector in 2006 in the US alone, up 13% on the previous year. The CEA refers joyously to a “consumer love affair with technology continuing at a healthy clip.” In the midst of a recession, 2009 saw $165 billion in sales, and households owned between fifteen and twenty-four gadgets on average. By 2010, US$233 billion was spent on electronic products, three-quarters of the population owned a computer, nearly half of all US adults owned an MP3 player, and 85% had a cell phone. By all measures, the amount of ICT/CE on the planet is staggering. As investigative science journalist, Elizabeth Grossman put it: “no industry pushes products into the global market on the scale that high-tech electronics does” (Maxwell and Miller 2). In 2007, “of the 2.25 million tons of TVs, cell phones and computer products ready for end-of-life management, 18% (414,000 tons) was collected for recycling and 82% (1.84 million tons) was disposed of, primarily in landfill” (Environmental Protection Agency 1). Twenty million computers fell obsolete across the US in 1998, and the rate was 130,000 a day by 2005. It has been estimated that the five hundred million personal computers discarded in the US between 1997 and 2007 contained 6.32 billion pounds of plastics, 1.58 billion pounds of lead, three million pounds of cadmium, 1.9 million pounds of chromium, and 632000 pounds of mercury (Environmental Protection Agency; Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 6). The European Union is expected to generate upwards of twelve million tons annually by 2020 (Commission of the European Communities 17). While refrigerators and dangerous refrigerants account for the bulk of EU e-waste, about 44% of the most toxic e-waste measured in 2005 came from medium-to-small ICT/CE: computer monitors, TVs, printers, ink cartridges, telecommunications equipment, toys, tools, and anything with a circuit board (Commission of the European Communities 31-34). Understanding the enormity of the environmental problems caused by making, using, and disposing of media technologies should arrest our enthusiasm for them. But intellectual correctives to the “love affair” with technology, or technophilia, have come and gone without establishing much of a foothold against the breathtaking flood of gadgets and the propaganda that proclaims their awe-inspiring capabilities.[i] There is a peculiar enchantment with the seeming magic of wireless communication, touch-screen phones and tablets, flat-screen high-definition televisions, 3-D IMAX cinema, mobile computing, and so on—a totemic, quasi-sacred power that the historian of technology David Nye has named the technological sublime (Nye Technological Sublime 297).[ii] We demonstrate in our book why there is no place for the technological sublime in projects to green the media. But first we should explain why such symbolic power does not accrue to more mundane technologies; after all, for the time-strapped cook, a pressure cooker does truly magical things. Three important qualities endow ICT/CE with unique symbolic potency—virtuality, volume, and novelty. The technological sublime of media technology is reinforced by the “virtual nature of much of the industry’s content,” which “tends to obscure their responsibility for a vast proliferation of hardware, all with high levels of built-in obsolescence and decreasing levels of efficiency” (Boyce and Lewis 5). Planned obsolescence entered the lexicon as a new “ethics” for electrical engineering in the 1920s and ’30s, when marketers, eager to “habituate people to buying new products,” called for designs to become quickly obsolete “in efficiency, economy, style, or taste” (Grossman 7-8).[iii] This defines the short lifespan deliberately constructed for computer systems (drives, interfaces, operating systems, batteries, etc.) by making tiny improvements incompatible with existing hardware (Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 33-50; Boyce and Lewis). With planned obsolescence leading to “dizzying new heights” of product replacement (Rogers 202), there is an overstated sense of the novelty and preeminence of “new” media—a “cult of the present” is particularly dazzled by the spread of electronic gadgets through globalization (Mattelart and Constantinou 22). References to the symbolic power of media technology can be found in hymnals across the internet and the halls of academe: technologies change us, the media will solve social problems or create new ones, ICTs transform work, monopoly ownership no longer matters, journalism is dead, social networking enables social revolution, and the media deliver a cleaner, post-industrial, capitalism. Here is a typical example from the twilight zone of the technological sublime (actually, the OECD): A major feature of the knowledge-based economy is the impact that ICTs have had on industrial structure, with a rapid growth of services and a relative decline of manufacturing. Services are typically less energy intensive and less polluting, so among those countries with a high and increasing share of services, we often see a declining energy intensity of production … with the emergence of the Knowledge Economy ending the old linear relationship between output and energy use (i.e. partially de-coupling growth and energy use) (Houghton 1) This statement mixes half-truths and nonsense. In reality, old-time, toxic manufacturing has moved to the Global South, where it is ascendant; pollution levels are rising worldwide; and energy consumption is accelerating in residential and institutional sectors, due almost entirely to ICT/CE usage, despite advances in energy conservation technology (a neat instance of the age-old Jevons Paradox). In our book we show how these are all outcomes of growth in ICT/CE, the foundation of the so-called knowledge-based economy. ICT/CE are misleadingly presented as having little or no material ecological impact. In the realm of everyday life, the sublime experience of electronic machinery conceals the physical work and material resources that go into them, while the technological sublime makes the idea that more-is-better palatable, axiomatic; even sexy. In this sense, the technological sublime relates to what Marx called “the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour” once they are in the hands of the consumer, who lusts after them as if they were “independent beings” (77). There is a direct but unseen relationship between technology’s symbolic power and the scale of its environmental impact, which the economist Juliet Schor refers to as a “materiality paradox” —the greater the frenzy to buy goods for their transcendent or nonmaterial cultural meaning, the greater the use of material resources (40-41). We wrote Greening the Media knowing that a study of the media’s effect on the environment must work especially hard to break the enchantment that inflames popular and elite passions for media technologies. We understand that the mere mention of the political-economic arrangements that make shiny gadgets possible, or the environmental consequences of their appearance and disappearance, is bad medicine. It’s an unwelcome buzz kill—not a cool way to converse about cool stuff. But we didn’t write the book expecting to win many allies among high-tech enthusiasts and ICT/CE industry leaders. We do not dispute the importance of information and communication media in our lives and modern social systems. We are media people by profession and personal choice, and deeply immersed in the study and use of emerging media technologies. But we think it’s time for a balanced assessment with less hype and more practical understanding of the relationship of media technologies to the biosphere they inhabit. Media consumers, designers, producers, activists, researchers, and policy makers must find new and effective ways to move ICT/CE production and consumption toward ecologically sound practices. In the course of this project, we found in casual conversation, lecture halls, classroom discussions, and correspondence, consistent and increasing concern with the environmental impact of media technology, especially the deleterious effects of e-waste toxins on workers, air, water, and soil. We have learned that the grip of the technological sublime is not ironclad. Its instability provides a point of departure for investigating and criticizing the relationship between the media and the environment. The media are, and have been for a long time, intimate environmental participants. Media technologies are yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s news, but rarely in the way they should be. The prevailing myth is that the printing press, telegraph, phonograph, photograph, cinema, telephone, wireless radio, television, and internet changed the world without changing the Earth. In reality, each technology has emerged by despoiling ecosystems and exposing workers to harmful environments, a truth obscured by symbolic power and the power of moguls to set the terms by which such technologies are designed and deployed. Those who benefit from ideas of growth, progress, and convergence, who profit from high-tech innovation, monopoly, and state collusion—the military-industrial-entertainment-academic complex and multinational commandants of labor—have for too long ripped off the Earth and workers. As the current celebration of media technology inevitably winds down, perhaps it will become easier to comprehend that digital wonders come at the expense of employees and ecosystems. This will return us to Max Weber’s insistence that we understand technology in a mundane way as a “mode of processing material goods” (27). Further to understanding that ordinariness, we can turn to the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, who noted three decades ago “the failures of technocratic dreams [:] that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Such fantasies derived from the very banality of these introductions—that every time they took place, one more “technical apparatus” was simply “being made at home with the rest of our world’ (548). Media studies can join in this repetitive banality. Or it can withdraw the welcome mat for media technologies that despoil the Earth and wreck the lives of those who make them. In our view, it’s time to green the media by greening media studies. References “A Cyber-House Divided.” Economist 4 Sep. 2010: 61-62. “Gartner Estimates ICT Industry Accounts for 2 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions.” Gartner press release. 6 April 2007. ‹http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867›. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia. Seattle: Basel Action Network, 25 Feb. 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “Central Park.” Trans. Lloyd Spencer with Mark Harrington. New German Critique 34 (1985): 32-58. Biagioli, Mario. “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 816-33. Boyce, Tammy and Justin Lewis, eds. Climate Change and the Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Commission of the European Communities. “Impact Assessment.” Commission Staff Working Paper accompanying the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) (recast). COM (2008) 810 Final. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 3 Dec. 2008. Environmental Protection Agency. Management of Electronic Waste in the United States. Washington, DC: EPA, 2007 Environmental Protection Agency. Statistics on the Management of Used and End-of-Life Electronics. Washington, DC: EPA, 2008 Grossman, Elizabeth. Tackling High-Tech Trash: The E-Waste Explosion & What We Can Do about It. New York: Demos, 2008. ‹http://www.demos.org/pubs/e-waste_FINAL.pdf› Herat, Sunil. “Review: Sustainable Management of Electronic Waste (e-Waste).” Clean 35.4 (2007): 305-10. Houghton, J. “ICT and the Environment in Developing Countries: Opportunities and Developments.” Paper prepared for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2009. International Telecommunication Union. ICTs for Environment: Guidelines for Developing Countries, with a Focus on Climate Change. Geneva: ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division Policies and Strategies Department ITU Telecommunication Development Sector, 2008. Malmodin, Jens, Åsa Moberg, Dag Lundén, Göran Finnveden, and Nina Lövehagen. “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Operational Electricity Use in the ICT and Entertainment & Media Sectors.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 14.5 (2010): 770-90. Marx, Karl. Capital: Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, 3rd ed. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1987. Mattelart, Armand and Costas M. Constantinou. “Communications/Excommunications: An Interview with Armand Mattelart.” Trans. Amandine Bled, Jacques Guot, and Costas Constantinou. Review of International Studies 34.1 (2008): 21-42. Mattelart, Armand. “Cómo nació el mito de Internet.” Trans. Yanina Guthman. El mito internet. Ed. Victor Hugo de la Fuente. Santiago: Editorial aún creemos en los sueños, 2002. 25-32. Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Nye, David E. Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2007. Orwell, George. “As I Please.” Tribune. 12 May 1944. Richtel, Matt. “Consumers Hold on to Products Longer.” New York Times: B1, 26 Feb. 2011. Robinson, Brett H. “E-Waste: An Assessment of Global Production and Environmental Impacts.” Science of the Total Environment 408.2 (2009): 183-91. Rogers, Heather. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: New Press, 2005. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Vols. I and II. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Malden: Blackwell, 1995. Schiller, Herbert I. Information and the Crisis Economy. Norwood: Ablex Publishing, 1984. Schor, Juliet B. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin, 2010. Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials. Los Angeles: Academy Imprints, 2007. Weber, Max. “Remarks on Technology and Culture.” Trans. Beatrix Zumsteg and Thomas M. Kemple. Ed. Thomas M. Kemple. Theory, Culture [i] The global recession that began in 2007 has been the main reason for some declines in Global North energy consumption, slower turnover in gadget upgrades, and longer periods of consumer maintenance of electronic goods (Richtel). [ii] The emergence of the technological sublime has been attributed to the Western triumphs in the post-Second World War period, when technological power supposedly supplanted the power of nature to inspire fear and astonishment (Nye Technology Matters 28). Historian Mario Biagioli explains how the sublime permeates everyday life through technoscience: "If around 1950 the popular imaginary placed science close to the military and away from the home, today’s technoscience frames our everyday life at all levels, down to our notion of the self" (818). [iii] This compulsory repetition is seemingly undertaken each time as a novelty, governed by what German cultural critic Walter Benjamin called, in his awkward but occasionally illuminating prose, "the ever-always-the-same" of "mass-production" cloaked in "a hitherto unheard-of significance" (48).

In the last decade, the cell phone’s transformation from a tool for mobile telephony into a multi-modal, computational “smart” media device has engendered a new kind of emplacement, and the ubiquity of technological mediation into the everyday settings of urban life. With it, a new kind of media literacy has become necessary for participation in the networked social publics (Ito; Jenkins et al.). Increasingly, the way we experience our physical environments, make sense of immediate events, and form impressions is through the lens of the camera and through the ear of the microphone, framed by the mediating possibilities of smartphones. Adopting these practices as a kind of new media “grammar” (Burn 29)—a multi-modal language for public and interpersonal communication—offers new perspectives for thinking about the way in which mobile computing technologies allow us to explore our environments and produce new types of cultural knowledge. Living in the Social Multiverse Many of us are concerned about new cultural practices that communication technologies bring about. In her now classic TED talk “Connected but alone?” Sherry Turkle talks about the world of instant communication as having the illusion of control through which we micromanage our immersion in mobile media and split virtual-physical presence. According to Turkle, what we fear is, on the one hand, being caught unprepared in a spontaneous event and, on the other hand, missing out or not documenting or recording events—a phenomenon that Abha Dawesar calls living in the “digital now.” There is, at the same time, a growing number of ways in which mobile computing devices connect us to new dimensions of everyday life and everyday experience: geo-locative services and augmented reality, convergent media and instantaneous participation in the social web. These technological capabilities arguably shift the nature of presence and set the stage for mobile users to communicate the flow of their everyday life through digital storytelling and media production. According to a Digital Insights survey on social media trends (Bennett), more than 500 million tweets are sent per day and 5 Vines tweeted every second; 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute; more than 20 billion photos have been shared on Instagram to date; and close to 7 million people actively produce and publish content using social blogging platforms. There are more than 1 billion smartphones in the US alone, and most social media platforms are primarily accessed using mobile devices. The question is: how do we understand the enormity of these statistics as a coherent new media phenomenon and as a predominant form of media production and cultural participation? More importantly, how do mobile technologies re-mediate the way we see, hear, and perceive our surrounding evironment as part of the cultural circuit of capturing, sharing, and communicating with and through media artefacts? Such questions have furnished communication theory even before McLuhan’s famous tagline “the medium is the message”. Much of the discourse around communication technology and the senses has been marked by distinctions between “orality” and “literacy” understood as forms of collective consciousness engendered by technological shifts. Leveraging Jonathan Sterne’s critique of this “audio-visual litany”, an exploration of convergent multi-modal technologies allows us to focus instead on practices and techniques of use, considered as both perceptual and cultural constructs that reflect and inform social life. Here in particular, a focus on sound—or aurality—can help provide a fresh new entry point into studying technology and culture. The phenomenon of everyday photography is already well conceptualised as a cultural expression and a practice connected with identity construction and interpersonal communication (Pink, Visual). Much more rarely do we study the act of capturing information using mobile media devices as a multi-sensory practice that entails perceptual techniques as well as aesthetic considerations, and as something that in turn informs our unmediated sensory experience. Daisuke and Ito argue that—in contrast to hobbyist high-quality photographers—users of camera phones redefine the materiality of urban surroundings as “picture-worthy” (or not) and elevate the “mundane into a photographic object.” Indeed, whereas traditionally recordings and photographs hold institutional legitimacy as reliable archival references, the proliferation of portable smart technologies has transformed user-generated content into the gold standard for authentically representing the everyday. Given that visual approaches to studying these phenomena are well underway, this project takes a sound studies perspective, focusing on mediated aural practices in order to explore the way people make sense of their everyday acoustic environments using mobile media. Curation, in this sense, is a metaphor for everyday media production, illuminated by the practice of listening with mobile technology. Everyday Listening with Technology: A Case Study The present conceptualisation of curation emerged out of a participant-driven qualitative case study focused on using mobile media to make sense of urban everyday life. The study comprised 10 participants using iPod Touches (a device equivalent to an iPhone, without the phone part) to produce daily “aural postcards” of their everyday soundscapes and sonic experiences, over the course of two to four weeks. This work was further informed by, and updates, sonic ethnography approaches nascent in the World Soundscape Project, and the field of soundscape studies more broadly. Participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their media and technology use, in order to establish their participation in new media culture and correlate that to the documentary styles used in their aural postcards. With regard to capturing sonic material, participants were given open-ended instructions as to content and location, and encouraged to use the full capabilities of the device—that is, to record audio, video, and images, and to use any applications on the device. Specifically, I drew their attention to a recording app (Recorder) and a decibel measurement app (dB), which combines a photo with a static readout of ambient sound levels. One way most participants described the experience of capturing sound in a collection of recordings for a period of time was as making a “digital scrapbook” or a “media diary.” Even though they had recorded individual (often unrelated) soundscapes, almost everyone felt that the final product came together as a stand-alone collection—a kind of gallery of personalised everyday experiences that participants, if anything, wished to further organise, annotate, and flesh out. Examples of aural postcard formats used by participants: decibel photographs of everyday environments and a comparison audio recording of rain on a car roof with and without wipers (in the middle). Working with 139 aural postcards comprising more than 250 audio files and 150 photos and videos, the first step in the analysis was to articulate approaches to media documentation in terms of format, modality, and duration as deliberate choices in conversation with dominant media forms that participants regularly consume and are familiar with. Ambient sonic recordings (audio-only) comprised a large chunk of the data, and within this category there were two approaches: the sonic highlight, a short vignette of a given soundscape with minimal or no introduction or voice-over; and the process recording, featuring the entire duration of an unfolding soundscape or event. Live commentaries, similar to the conventions set forth by radio documentaries, represented voice-over entries at the location of the sound event, sometimes stationary and often in motion as the event unfolded. Voice memos described verbal reflections, pre- or post- sound event, with no discernable ambience—that is, participants intended them to serve as reflective devices rather than as part of the event. Finally, a number of participants also used the sound level meter app, which allowed them to generate visual records of the sonic levels of a given environment or location in the form of sound level photographs. Recording as a Way of Listening In their community soundwalking practice, Förnstrom and Taylor refer to recording sound in everyday settings as taking world experience, mediating it through one’s body and one’s memories and translating it into approximate experience. The media artefacts generated by participants as part of this study constitute precisely such ‘approximations’ of everyday life accessed through aural experience and mediated by the technological capabilities of the iPod. Thinking of aural postcards along this technological axis, the act of documenting everyday soundscapes involves participants acting as media producers, ‘framing’ urban everyday life through a mobile documentary rubric. In the process of curating these documentaries, they have to make decisions about the significance and stylistic framing of each entry and the message they wish to communicate. In order to bring the scope of these curatorial decisions into dialogue with established media forms, in this work’s analysis I combine Bill Nichols’s classification of documentary modes in cinema with Karin Bijsterveld’s concept of soundscape ‘staging’ to characterise the various approaches participants took to the multi-modal curation of their everyday (sonic) experience. In her recent book on the staging of urban soundscapes in both creative and documentary/archival media, Bijsterveld describes the representation of sound as particular ‘dramatisations’ that construct different kinds of meanings about urban space and engender different kinds of listening positions. Nichols’s articulation of cinematic documentary modes helps detail ways in which the author’s intentionality is reflected in the styling, design, and presentation of filmic narratives. Michel Chion’s discussion of cinematic listening modes further contextualises the cultural construction of listening that is a central part of both design and experience of media artefacts. The conceptual lens is especially relevant to understanding mobile curation of mediated sonic experience as a kind of mobile digital storytelling. Working across all postcards, settings, and formats, the following four themes capture some of the dominant stylistic dimensions of mobile media documentation. The exploratory approach describes a methodology for representing everyday life as a flow, predominantly through ambient recordings of unfolding processes that participants referred to in the final discussion as a ‘turn it on and forget it’ approach to recording. As a stylistic method, the exploratory approach aligns most closely with Nichols’s poetic and observational documentary modes, combining a ‘window to the world’ aesthetic with minimal narration, striving to convey the ‘inner truth’ of phenomenal experience. In terms of listening modes reflected in this approach, exploratory aural postcards most strongly engage causal listening, to use Chion’s framework of cinematic listening modes. By and large, the exploratory approach describes incidental documentaries of routine events: soundscapes that are featured as a result of greater attentiveness and investment in the sonic aspects of everyday life. The entries created using this approach reflect a process of discovering (seeing and hearing) the ordinary as extra-ordinary; re-experiencing sometimes mundane and routine places and activities with a fresh perspective; and actively exploring hidden characteristics, nuances of meaning, and significance. For instance, in the following example, one participant explores a new neighborhood while on a work errand:The narrative approach to creating aural postcards stages sound as a springboard for recollecting memories and storytelling through reflecting on associations with other soundscapes, environments, and interactions. Rather than highlighting place, routine, or sound itself, this methodology constructs sound as a window into the identity and inner life of the recordist, mobilising most strongly a semantic listening mode through association and narrative around sound’s meaning in context (Chion 28). This approach combines a subjective narrative development with a participatory aesthetic that draws the listener into the unfolding story. This approach is also performative, in that it stages sound as a deeply subjective experience and approaches the narrative from a personally significant perspective. Most often this type of sound staging was curated using voice memo narratives about a particular sonic experience in conjunction with an ambient sonic highlight, or as a live commentary. Recollections typically emerged from incidental encounters, or in the midst of other observations about sound. In the following example a participant reminisces about the sound of wind, which, interestingly, she did not record: Today I have been listening to the wind. It’s really rainy and windy outside today and it was reminding me how much I like the sound of wind. And you know when I was growing up on the wide prairies, we sure had a lot of wind and sometimes I kind of miss the sound of it… (Participant 1) The aesthetic approach describes instances where the creation of aural postcards was motivated by a reduced listening position (Chion 29)—driven primarily by the qualities and features of the soundscape itself. This curatorial practice for staging mediated aural experience combines a largely subjective approach to documenting with an absence of traditional narrative development and an affective and evocative aesthetic. Where the exploratory documentary approach seeks to represent place, routine, environment, and context through sonic characteristics, the aesthetic approach features sound first and foremost, aiming to represent and comment on sound qualities and characteristics in a more ‘authentic’ manner. The media formats most often used in conjunction with this approach were the incidental ambient sonic highlight and the live commentary. In the following example we have the sound of coffee being made as an important domestic ritual where important auditory qualities are foregrounded: That’s the sound of a stovetop percolator which I’ve been using for many years and I pretty much know exactly how long it takes to make a pot of coffee by the sound that it makes. As soon as it starts gurgling I know I have about a minute before it burns. It’s like the coffee calls and I come. (Participant 6) The analytical approach characterises entries that stage mediated aural experience as a way of systematically and inductively investigating everyday phenomena. It is a conceptual and analytical experimental methodology employed to move towards confirming or disproving a ‘hypothesis’ or forming a theory about sonic relations developed in the course of the study. As such, this approach most strongly aligns with Chion’s semantic listening mode, with the addition of the interactive element of analytical inquiry. In this context, sound is treated as a variable to be measured, compared, researched, and theorised about in an explicit attempt to form conclusions about social relationships, personal significance, place, or function. This analytical methodology combines an explicit and critical focus to the process of documenting itself (whether it be measuring decibels or systematically attending to sonic qualities) with a distinctive analytical synthesis that presents as ‘formal discovery’ or even ‘truth.’ In using this approach, participants most often mobilised the format of short sonic highlights and follow-up voice memos. While these aural postcards typically contained sound level photographs (decibel measurement values), in some cases the inquiry and subsequent conclusions were made inductively through sustained observation of a series of soundscapes. The following example is by a participant who exclusively recorded and compared various domestic spaces in terms of sound levels, comparing and contrasting them using voice memos. This is a sound level photograph of his home computer system: So I decided to record sitting next to my computer today just because my computer is loud, so I wanted to see exactly how loud it really was. But I kept the door closed just to be sort of fair, see how quiet it could possibly get. I think it peaked at 75 decibels, and that’s like, I looked up a decibel scale, and apparently a lawn mower is like 90 decibels. (Participant 2) Mediated Curation as a New Media Cultural Practice? One aspect of adopting the metaphor of ‘curation’ towards everyday media production is that it shifts the critical discourse on aesthetic expression from the realm of specialised expertise to general practice (“Everyone’s a photographer”). The act of curation is filtered through the aesthetic and technological capabilities of the smartphone, a device that has become co-constitutive of our routine sensorial encounters with the world. Revisiting McLuhan-inspired discourses on communication technologies stages the iPhone not as a device that itself shifts consciousness but as an agent in a media ecology co-constructed by the forces of use and design—a “crystallization of cultural practices” (Sterne). As such, mobile technology is continuously re-crystalised as design ‘constraints’ meet both normative and transgressive user approaches to interacting with everyday life. The concept of ‘social curation’ already exists in commercial discourse for social web marketing (O’Connell; Allton). High-traffic, wide-integration web services such as Digg and Pinterest, as well as older portals such as Reddit, all work on the principles of arranging user-generated, web-aggregated, and re-purposed content around custom themes. From a business perspective, the notion of ‘social curation’ captures, unsurprisingly, only the surface level of consumer behaviour rather than the kinds of values and meaning that this process holds for people. In the more traditional sense, art curation involves aesthetic, pragmatic, epistemological, and communication choices about the subject of (re)presentation, including considerations such as manner of display, intended audience, and affective and phenomenal impact. In his 2012 book tracing the discourse and culture of curating, Paul O’Neill proposes that over the last few decades the role of the curator has shifted from one of arts administrator to important agent in the production of cultural experiences, an influential cultural figure in her own right, independent of artistic content (88). Such discursive shifts in the formulation of ‘curatorship’ can easily be transposed from a specialised to a generalised context of cultural production, in which everyone with the technological means to capture, share, and frame the material and sensory content of everyday life is a curator of sorts. Each of us is an agent with a unique aesthetic and epistemological perspective, regardless of the content we curate. The entire communicative exchange is necessarily located within a nexus of new media practices as an activity that simultaneously frames a cultural construction of sensory experience and serves as a cultural production of the self. To return to the question of listening and a sound studies perspective into mediated cultural practices, technology has not single-handedly changed the way we listen and attend to everyday experience, but it has certainly influenced the range and manner in which we make sense of the sensory ‘everyday’. Unlike acoustic listening, mobile digital technologies prompt us to frame sonic experience in a multi-modal and multi-medial fashion—through the microphone, through the camera, and through the interactive, analytical capabilities of the device itself. Each decision for sensory capture as a curatorial act is both epistemological and aesthetic; it implies value of personal significance and an intention to communicate meaning. The occurrences that are captured constitute impressions, highlights, significant moments, emotions, reflections, experiments, and creative efforts—very different knowledge artefacts from those produced through textual means. Framing phenomenal experience—in this case, listening—in this way is, I argue, a core characteristic of a more general type of new media literacy and sensibility: that of multi-modal documenting of sensory materialities, or the curation of everyday life. References Allton, Mike. “5 Cool Content Curation Tools for Social Marketers.” Social Media Today. 15 Apr. 2013. 10 June 2015 ‹http://socialmediatoday.com/mike-allton/1378881/5-cool-content-curation-tools-social-marketers›. Bennett, Shea. “Social Media Stats 2014.” Mediabistro. 9 June 2014. 20 June 2015 ‹http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-statistics-2014_b57746›. Bijsterveld, Karin, ed. Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2013. Burn, Andrew. Making New Media: Creative Production and Digital Literacies. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. Daisuke, Okabe, and Mizuko Ito. “Camera Phones Changing the Definition of Picture-worthy.” Japan Media Review. 8 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.dourish.com/classes/ics234cw04/ito3.pdf›. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1994. Förnstrom, Mikael, and Sean Taylor. “Creative Soundwalks.” Urban Soundscapes and Critical Citizenship Symposium. Limerick, Ireland. 27–29 March 2014. Ito, Mizuko, ed. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010. Jenkins, Henry, Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. White Paper prepared for the McArthur Foundation, 2006. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Nichols, Brian. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana UP, 2001. Nielsen. “State of the Media – The Social Media Report.” Nielsen 4 Dec. 2012. 12 May 2015 ‹http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2012/state-of-the-media-the-social-media-report-2012.html›. O’Connel, Judy. “Social Content Curation – A Shift from the Traditional.” 8 Aug. 2011. 11 May 2015 ‹http://judyoconnell.com/2011/08/08/social-content-curation-a-shift-from-the-traditional/›. O’Neill, Paul. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography. London, UK: Sage, 2007. ———. Situating Everyday Life. London, UK: Sage, 2012. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Schafer, R. Murray, ed. World Soundscape Project. European Sound Diary (reprinted). Vancouver: A.R.C. Publications, 1977. Turkle, Sherry. “Connected But Alone?” TED Talk, Feb. 2012. 8 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together?language=en›.

Connecting I’ve moved house on the weekend, closer to the centre of an Australian capital city. I had recently signed up for broadband, with a major Australian Internet company (my first contact, cf. Turner). Now I am the proud owner of a larger modem than I have ever owned: a white cable modem. I gaze out into our new street: two thick black cables cosseted in silver wire. I am relieved. My new home is located in one of those streets, double-cabled by Telstra and Optus in the data-rush of the mid-1990s. Otherwise, I’d be moth-balling the cable modem, and the thrill of my data percolating down coaxial cable. And it would be off to the computer supermarket to buy an ASDL modem, then to pick a provider, to squeeze some twenty-first century connectivity out of old copper (the phone network our grandparents and great-grandparents built). If I still lived in the country, or the outskirts of the city, or anywhere else more than four kilometres from the phone exchange, and somewhere that cable pay TV will never reach, it would be a dish for me — satellite. Our digital lives are premised upon infrastructure, the networks through which we shape what we do, fashion the meanings of our customs and practices, and exchange signs with others. Infrastructure is not simply the material or the technical (Lamberton), but it is the dense, fibrous knotting together of social visions, cultural resources, individual desires, and connections. No more can one easily discern between ‘society’ and ‘technology’, ‘carriage’ and ‘content’, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, or ‘infrastructure’ and ‘applications’ (or ‘services’ or ‘content’). To understand telecommunications in action, or the vectors of fibre, we need to consider the long and heterogeneous list of links among different human and non-human actors — the long networks, to take Bruno Latour’s evocative concept, that confect our broadband networks (Latour). The co-ordinates of our infrastructure still build on a century-long history of telecommunications networks, on the nineteenth-century centrality of telegraphy preceding this, and on the histories of the public and private so inscribed. Yet we are in the midst of a long, slow dismantling of the posts-telegraph-telephone (PTT) model of the monopoly carrier for each nation that dominated the twentieth century, with its deep colonial foundations. Instead our New World Information and Communication Order is not the decolonising UNESCO vision of the late 1970s and early 1980s (MacBride, Maitland). Rather it is the neoliberal, free trade, market access model, its symbol the 1984 US judicial decision to require the break-up of AT&T and the UK legislation in the same year that underpinned the Thatcherite twin move to privatize British Telecom and introduce telecommunications competition. Between 1984 and 1999, 110 telecommunications companies were privatized, and the ‘acquisition of privatized PTOs [public telecommunications operators] by European and American operators does follow colonial lines’ (Winseck 396; see also Mody, Bauer & Straubhaar). The competitive market has now been uneasily installed as the paradigm for convergent communications networks, not least with the World Trade Organisation’s 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services and Annex on Telecommunications. As the citizen is recast as consumer and customer (Goggin, ‘Citizens and Beyond’), we rethink our cultural and political axioms as well as the axes that orient our understandings in this area. Information might travel close to the speed of light, and we might fantasise about optical fibre to the home (or pillow), but our terrain, our band where the struggle lies today, is narrower than we wish. Begging for broadband, it seems, is a long way from warchalking for WiFi. Policy Circuits The dreary everyday business of getting connected plugs the individual netizen into a tangled mess of policy circuits, as much as tricky network negotiations. Broadband in mid-2003 in Australia is a curious chimera, welded together from a patchwork of technologies, old and newer communications industries, emerging economies and patterns of use. Broadband conjures up grander visions, however, of communication and cultural cornucopia. Broadband is high-speed, high-bandwidth, ‘always-on’, networked communications. People can send and receive video, engage in multimedia exchanges of all sorts, make the most of online education, realise the vision of home-based work and trading, have access to telemedicine, and entertainment. Broadband really entered the lexicon with the mass takeup of the Internet in the early to mid-1990s, and with the debates about something called the ‘information superhighway’. The rise of the Internet, the deregulation of telecommunications, and the involuted convergence of communications and media technologies saw broadband positioned at the centre of policy debates nearly a decade ago. In 1993-1994, Australia had its Broadband Services Expert Group (BSEG), established by the then Labor government. The BSEG was charged with inquiring into ‘issues relating to the delivery of broadband services to homes, schools and businesses’. Stung by criticisms of elite composition (a narrow membership, with only one woman among its twelve members, and no consumer or citizen group representation), the BSEG was prompted into wider public discussion and consultation (Goggin & Newell). The then Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE), since transmogrified into the Communications Research Unit of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), conducted its large-scale Communications Futures Project (BTCE and Luck). The BSEG Final report posed the question starkly: As a society we have choices to make. If we ignore the opportunities we run the risk of being left behind as other countries introduce new services and make themselves more competitive: we will become consumers of other countries’ content, culture and technologies rather than our own. Or we could adopt new technologies at any cost…This report puts forward a different approach, one based on developing a new, user-oriented strategy for communications. The emphasis will be on communication among people... (BSEG v) The BSEG proposed a ‘National Strategy for New Communications Networks’ based on three aspects: education and community access, industry development, and the role of government (BSEG x). Ironically, while the nation, or at least its policy elites, pondered the weighty question of broadband, Australia’s two largest telcos were doing it. The commercial decision of Telstra/Foxtel and Optus Vision, and their various television partners, was to nail their colours (black) to the mast, or rather telegraph pole, and to lay cable in the major capital cities. In fact, they duplicated the infrastructure in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne, then deciding it would not be profitable to cable up even regional centres, let alone small country towns or settlements. As Terry Flew and Christina Spurgeon observe: This wasteful duplication contrasted with many other parts of the country that would never have access to this infrastructure, or to the social and economic benefits that it was perceived to deliver. (Flew & Spurgeon 72) The implications of this decision for Australia’s telecommunications and television were profound, but there was little, if any, public input into this. Then Minister Michael Lee was very proud of his anti-siphoning list of programs, such as national sporting events, that would remain on free-to-air television rather than screen on pay, but was unwilling, or unable, to develop policy on broadband and pay TV cable infrastructure (on the ironies of Australia’s television history, see Given’s masterly account). During this period also, it may be remembered, Australia’s Internet was being passed into private hands, with the tendering out of AARNET (see Spurgeon for discussion). No such national strategy on broadband really emerged in the intervening years, nor has the market provided integrated, accessible broadband services. In 1997, landmark telecommunications legislation was enacted that provided a comprehensive framework for competition in telecommunications, as well as consolidating and extending consumer protection, universal service, customer service standards, and other reforms (CLC). Carrier and reseller competition had commenced in 1991, and the 1997 legislation gave it further impetus. Effective competition is now well established in long distance telephone markets, and in mobiles. Rivalrous competition exists in the market for local-call services, though viable alternatives to Telstra’s dominance are still few (Fels). Broadband too is an area where there is symbolic rivalry rather than effective competition. This is most visible in advertised ADSL offerings in large cities, yet most of the infrastructure for these services is comprised by Telstra’s copper, fixed-line network. Facilities-based duopoly competition exists principally where Telstra/Foxtel and Optus cable networks have been laid, though there are quite a number of ventures underway by regional telcos, power companies, and, most substantial perhaps, the ACT government’s TransACT broadband network. Policymakers and industry have been greatly concerned about what they see as slow takeup of broadband, compared to other countries, and by barriers to broadband competition and access to ‘bottleneck’ facilities (such as Telstra or Optus’s networks) by potential competitors. The government has alternated between trying to talk up broadband benefits and rates of take up and recognising the real difficulties Australia faces as a large country with a relative small and dispersed population. In March 2003, Minister Alston directed the ACCC to implement new monitoring and reporting arrangements on competition in the broadband industry. A key site for discussion of these matters has been the competition policy institution, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and its various inquiries, reports, and considerations (consult ACCC’s telecommunications homepage at http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm). Another key site has been the Productivity Commission (http://www.pc.gov.au), while a third is the National Office on the Information Economy (NOIE - http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/access/access/broadband1.htm). Others have questioned whether even the most perfectly competitive market in broadband will actually provide access to citizens and consumers. A great deal of work on this issue has been undertaken by DCITA, NOIE, the regulators, and industry bodies, not to mention consumer and public interest groups. Since 1997, there have been a number of governmental inquiries undertaken or in progress concerning the takeup of broadband and networked new media (for example, a House of Representatives Wireless Broadband Inquiry), as well as important inquiries into the still most strategically important of Australia’s companies in this area, Telstra. Much of this effort on an ersatz broadband policy has been piecemeal and fragmented. There are fundamental difficulties with the large size of the Australian continent and its harsh terrain, the small size of the Australian market, the number of providers, and the dominant position effectively still held by Telstra, as well as Singtel Optus (Optus’s previous overseas investors included Cable & Wireless and Bell South), and the larger telecommunications and Internet companies (such as Ozemail). Many consumers living in metropolitan Australia still face real difficulties in realising the slogan ‘bandwidth for all’, but the situation in parts of rural Australia is far worse. Satellite ‘broadband’ solutions are available, through Telstra Countrywide or other providers, but these offer limited two-way interactivity. Data can be received at reasonable speeds (though at far lower data rates than how ‘broadband’ used to be defined), but can only be sent at far slower rates (Goggin, Rural Communities Online). The cultural implications of these digital constraints may well be considerable. Computer gamers, for instance, are frustrated by slow return paths. In this light, the final report of the January 2003 Broadband Advisory Group (BAG) is very timely. The BAG report opens with a broadband rhapsody: Broadband communications technologies can deliver substantial economic and social benefits to Australia…As well as producing productivity gains in traditional and new industries, advanced connectivity can enrich community life, particularly in rural and regional areas. It provides the basis for integration of remote communities into national economic, cultural and social life. (BAG 1, 7) Its prescriptions include: Australia will be a world leader in the availability and effective use of broadband...and to capture the economic and social benefits of broadband connectivity...Broadband should be available to all Australians at fair and reasonable prices…Market arrangements should be pro-competitive and encourage investment...The Government should adopt a National Broadband Strategy (BAG 1) And, like its predecessor nine years earlier, the BAG report does make reference to a national broadband strategy aiming to maximise “choice in work and recreation activities available to all Australians independent of location, background, age or interests” (17). However, the idea of a national broadband strategy is not something the BAG really comes to grips with. The final report is keen on encouraging broadband adoption, but not explicit on how barriers to broadband can be addressed. Perhaps this is not surprising given that the membership of the BAG, dominated by representatives of large corporations and senior bureaucrats was even less representative than its BSEG predecessor. Some months after the BAG report, the Federal government did declare a broadband strategy. It did so, intriguingly enough, under the rubric of its response to the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry report (Estens), the second inquiry responsible for reassuring citizens nervous about the full-privatisation of Telstra (the first inquiry being Besley). The government’s grand $142.8 million National Broadband Strategy focusses on the ‘broadband needs of regional Australians, in partnership with all levels of government’ (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’). Among other things, the government claims that the Strategy will result in “improved outcomes in terms of services and prices for regional broadband access; [and] the development of national broadband infrastructure assets.” (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’) At the same time, the government announced an overall response to the Estens Inquiry, with specific safeguards for Telstra’s role in regional communications — a preliminary to the full Telstra sale (Alston, ‘Future Proofing’). Less publicised was the government’s further initiative in indigenous telecommunications, complementing its Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities (DCITA). Indigenous people, it can be argued, were never really contemplated as citizens with the ken of the universal service policy taken to underpin the twentieth-century government monopoly PTT project. In Australia during the deregulatory and re-regulatory 1990s, there was a great reluctance on the part of Labor and Coalition Federal governments, Telstra and other industry participants, even to research issues of access to and use of telecommunications by indigenous communicators. Telstra, and to a lesser extent Optus (who had purchased AUSSAT as part of their licence arrangements), shrouded the issue of indigenous communications in mystery that policymakers were very reluctant to uncover, let alone systematically address. Then regulator, the Australian Telecommunications Authority (AUSTEL), had raised grave concerns about indigenous telecommunications access in its 1991 Rural Communications inquiry. However, there was no government consideration of, nor research upon, these issues until Alston commissioned a study in 2001 — the basis for the TAPRIC strategy (DCITA). The elision of indigenous telecommunications from mainstream industry and government policy is all the more puzzling, if one considers the extraordinarily varied and significant experiments by indigenous Australians in telecommunications and Internet (not least in the early work of the Tanami community, made famous in media and cultural studies by the writings of anthropologist Eric Michaels). While the government’s mid-2003 moves on a ‘National Broadband Strategy’ attend to some details of the broadband predicament, they fall well short of an integrated framework that grasps the shortcomings of the neoliberal communications model. The funding offered is a token amount. The view from the seat of government is a glance from the rear-view mirror: taking a snapshot of rural communications in the years 2000-2002 and projecting this tableau into a safety-net ‘future proofing’ for the inevitable turning away of a fully-privately-owned Telstra from its previously universal, ‘carrier of last resort’ responsibilities. In this aetiolated, residualist policy gaze, citizens remain constructed as consumers in a very narrow sense in this incremental, quietist version of state securing of market arrangements. What is missing is any more expansive notion of citizens, their varied needs, expectations, uses, and cultural imaginings of ‘always on’ broadband networks. Hybrid Networks “Most people on earth will eventually have access to networks that are all switched, interactive, and broadband”, wrote Frances Cairncross in 1998. ‘Eventually’ is a very appropriate word to describe the parlous state of broadband technology implementation. Broadband is in a slow state of evolution and invention. The story of broadband so far underscores the predicament for Australian access to bandwidth, when we lack any comprehensive, integrated, effective, and fair policy in communications and information technology. We have only begun to experiment with broadband technologies and understand their evolving uses, cultural forms, and the sense in which they rework us as subjects. Our communications networks are not superhighways, to invoke an enduring artefact from an older technology. Nor any longer are they a single ‘public’ switched telecommunications network, like those presided over by the post-telegraph-telephone monopolies of old. Like roads themselves, or the nascent postal system of the sixteenth century, broadband is a patchwork quilt. The ‘fibre’ of our communications networks is hybrid. To be sure, powerful corporations dominate, like the Tassis or Taxis who served as postmasters to the Habsburg emperors (Briggs & Burke 25). Activating broadband today provides a perspective on the path dependency of technology history, and how we can open up new threads of a communications fabric. Our options for transforming our multitudinous networked lives emerge as much from everyday tactics and strategies as they do from grander schemes and unifying policies. We may care to reflect on the waning potential for nation-building technology, in the wake of globalisation. We no longer gather our imagined community around a Community Telephone Plan as it was called in 1960 (Barr, Moyal, and PMG). Yet we do require national and international strategies to get and stay connected (Barr), ideas and funding that concretely address the wider dimensions of access and use. We do need to debate the respective roles of Telstra, the state, community initiatives, and industry competition in fair telecommunications futures. Networks have global reach and require global and national integration. Here vision, co-ordination, and resources are urgently required for our commonweal and moral fibre. To feel the width of the band we desire, we need to plug into and activate the policy circuits. Thanks to Grayson Cooke, Patrick Lichty, Ned Rossiter, John Pace, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. Works Cited Alston, Richard. ‘ “Future Proofing” Regional Communications.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115485,00.php> —. ‘A National Broadband Strategy.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115486,00.php>. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Broadband Services Report March 2003. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm>. —. Emerging Market Structures in the Communications Sector. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 15 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/pubs/publications/utilities/telecommu... ...nications/Emerg_mar_struc.doc>. Barr, Trevor. new media.com: The Changing Face of Australia’s Media and Telecommunications. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Besley, Tim (Telecommunications Service Inquiry). Connecting Australia: Telecommunications Service Inquiry. Canberra: Department of Information, Communications and the Arts, 2000. 17 July 2003 <http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/final_report.php>. Briggs, Asa, and Burke, Peter. A Social History of the Internet: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Broadband Advisory Group. Australia’s Broadband Connectivity: The Broadband Advisory Group’s Report to Government. Melbourne: National Office on the Information Economy, 2003. 15 July 2003 <http://www.noie.gov.au/publications/NOIE/BAG/report/index.htm>. Broadband Services Expert Group. Networking Australia’s Future: Final Report. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service (AGPS), 1994. Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE). Communications Futures Final Project. Canberra: AGPS, 1994. Cairncross, Frances. The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives. London: Orion Business Books, 1997. Communications Law Centre (CLC). Australian Telecommunications Regulation: The Communications Law Centre Guide. 2nd edition. Sydney: Communications Law Centre, University of NSW, 2001. Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA). Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities: Report on the Strategic Study for Improving Telecommunications in Remote Indigenous Communities. Canberra: DCITA, 2002. Estens, D. Connecting Regional Australia: The Report of the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry. Canberra: DCITA, 2002. <http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/rti-report.php>, accessed 17 July 2003. Fels, Alan. ‘Competition in Telecommunications’, speech to Australian Telecommunications Users Group 19th Annual Conference. 6 March, 2003, Sydney. <http://www.accc.gov.au/speeches/2003/Fels_ATUG_6March03.doc>, accessed 15 July 2003. Flew, Terry, and Spurgeon, Christina. ‘Television After Broadcasting’. In The Australian TV Book. Ed. Graeme Turner and Stuart Cunningham. Allen & Unwin, Sydney. 69-85. 2000. Given, Jock. Turning Off the Television. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Goggin, Gerard. ‘Citizens and Beyond: Universal service in the Twilight of the Nation-State.’ In All Connected?: Universal Service in Telecommunications, ed. Bruce Langtry. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1998. 49-77 —. Rural Communities Online: Networking to link Consumers to Providers. Melbourne: Telstra Consumer Consultative Council, 2003. Goggin, Gerard, and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (HoR). Connecting Australia!: Wireless Broadband. Report of Inquiry into Wireless Broadband Technologies. Canberra: Parliament House, 2002. <http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/cita/Wbt/report.htm>, accessed 17 July 2003. Lamberton, Don. ‘A Telecommunications Infrastructure is Not an Information Infrastructure’. Prometheus: Journal of Issues in Technological Change, Innovation, Information Economics, Communication and Science Policy 14 (1996): 31-38. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Luck, David. ‘Revisiting the Future: Assessing the 1994 BTCE communications futures project.’ Media International Australia 96 (2000): 109-119. MacBride, Sean (Chair of International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems). Many Voices, One World: Towards a New More Just and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order. Paris: Kegan Page, London. UNESCO, 1980. Maitland Commission (Independent Commission on Worldwide Telecommunications Development). The Missing Link. Geneva: International Telecommunications Union, 1985. Michaels, Eric. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Mody, Bella, Bauer, Johannes M., and Straubhaar, Joseph D., eds. Telecommunications Politics: Ownership and Control of the Information Highway in Developing Countries. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995. Moyal, Ann. Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1984. Post-Master General’s Department (PMG). Community Telephone Plan for Australia. Melbourne: PMG, 1960. Productivity Commission (PC). Telecommunications Competition Regulation: Inquiry Report. Report No. 16. Melbourne: Productivity Commission, 2001. <http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/telecommunications/finalreport/>, accessed 17 July 2003. Spurgeon, Christina. ‘National Culture, Communications and the Information Economy.’ Media International Australia 87 (1998): 23-34. Turner, Graeme. ‘First Contact: coming to terms with the cable guy.’ UTS Review 3 (1997): 109-21. Winseck, Dwayne. ‘Wired Cities and Transnational Communications: New Forms of Governance for Telecommunications and the New Media’. In The Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, ed. Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone. London: Sage, 2002. 393-409. World Trade Organisation. General Agreement on Trade in Services: Annex on Telecommunications. Geneva: World Trade Organisation, 1994. 17 July 2003 <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/12-tel_e.htm>. —. Fourth protocol to the General Agreement on Trade in Services. Geneva: World Trade Organisation. 17 July 2003 <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/4prote_e.htm>. Links http://www.accc.gov.au/pubs/publications/utilities/telecommunications/Emerg_mar_struc.doc http://www.accc.gov.au/speeches/2003/Fels_ATUG_6March03.doc http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/cita/Wbt/report.htm http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115485,00.html http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115486,00.html http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/access/access/broadband1.htm http://www.noie.gov.au/publications/NOIE/BAG/report/index.htm http://www.pc.gov.au http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/telecommunications/finalreport/ http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/final_report.html http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/rti-report.html http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/12-tel_e.htm http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/4prote_e.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Broadband" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/02-featurebroadband.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (2003, Aug 26). Broadband. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/02-featurebroadband.php>