Literatura académica sobre el tema "Cyberspace Cyberspace Optimism"

The transition of the warfare mentality from the conventional domains of engagement (air, land, maritime, and space) to the cyberspace domain has not been an easy one for established organizations and institutions. The battlefield, in which now speed and stealth instead of size and budget are the determining factors that provide an edge have not well for many, especially those in the military. Now they do not clearly dictate who amongst combatants have the ‘upper hand' and represent a significant paradigm shift from factors that were very good predictors of a potential outcome of military conflicts. The battles of the past were largely over territories and resources (Landscape Metrics, 2015). We see outcomes now being influenced by a broader range of factors, including politics, culture, economy, religion, and ethnicity. These new ‘pivot points' for conflict require a very different understanding and approach to achieve desired outcomes. Technology continues to be the main enabler that has transformed the battlefield and the rules of engagement from the conventional domains to cyberspace. The issue of attribution has been a huge differentiator and looms very large in cyberspace conflicts because it is very difficult to determine within a sufficient timeframe the source of an attack and to be able to respond to or prevent attacks. Now conflicts have expanded in such a way that combatants now cross all prospective levels of society from targets to attackers or perpetrators. The low cost required to provide significant damage to a desired target environment in cyberspace has been a game changer. As a result, the rules of engagement which were much clearer in conventional domains on military fronts are much more blurred due to the new realm of combatants, and as such, has changed many of the approaches and methodologies that were standard practices in traditional campaigns. In this paper, we focus on cyber conflicts and how the cultural differences of these three communities have plagued the ability to achieve a simple and coherent response against attackers and perpetrators. We pursue the relevance of trust and deterrence and their influence on ‘warfare' tactics in the cyberspace domain. We also look at culture and the ‘new norm' and how they have required consideration of new and unconventional approaches. We see how data can better inform decision makers and those responsible for designing and implementing campaigns in this new era of conflict. Our results indicate the need for a different model to work through the differences in culture if better are to be obtained by the combatants. In addition, we see that an approach that includes cyber deterrence framed in the context of active defense provides optimism on future outcomes.

The article proposes a concept for e-course scenario design, which takes into account three dimensions of learning mentioned by K. Illeris: cognitive, emotional and social one. The author notes that due to the nature of the activity in cyberspace, the process of designing virtual resources should include an additional, fourth dimension – psychomotor. In her view, the adaptation of a modified concept of Illeris will help to optimise the process of analysis and design of educational activities, especially in the face of challenges that will arise in the nearest future.

In this era of third-generation media, political battles not only occur in the real world but also occur in cyberspace. Various strategies and products of political campaigns using social media have become commonplace in political communication. This happens because along with the disruption of public communication media, conventional campaign ideas and models have also expanded into cyber channels and shaped cyber politics reality. The uniqueness of this research is antagonistic narratives such as hoax, ethnicity, religion, race, intergroup, and provocation in the 2019 Presidential Election political campaign on Twitter from January 1st, 2019 to April 13th, 2019. This research intends to critically analyze the narrative of political campaigns on Twitter using the Agonism Cyber-politic approach. The method used in this research is Multimodal Critical Cyberculture Analysis to analyze the multimodality text (text and image components), Using hashtags to amplificated a political narration, and the antagonism narrations that develops on Twitter by supporting accounts of Jokowi and Prabowo. The results showed that the @jokowi and @prabowo accounts were the accounts with the highest engagement in spreading political campaign narratives on Twitter. The @jokowi account uses optimistic narratives, while @prabowo tends to use pessimistic narratives. Nevertheless, there are so many antagonism narratives like hoax, fake news, propaganda, and politicization of SARA which are specified by anonymous accounts. These antagonistic narratives are more developed in cyber politics discourse on Twitter. The result is horizontal conflict among Indonesian people. The community represented by netizens experienced division and formed two clusters. This fact certainly reduces the meaning of Indonesian democracy which should be substantive to mere procedural. It was found out that the concept of agonistic politics becomes practice of Indonesian democracy, based on the philosophy of the Indonesian nation Keywords: Jokowi, Prabowo, 2019 Presidential Election, political campaign, twitter, cyber politic, Indonesian cyber-democracy ABSTRAKDi era media generasi ketiga sekarang ini, pertarungan politik tidak hanya terjadi di dunia nyata, tetapi juga terjadi di dunia maya. Berbagai strategi dan produk kampanye politik menggunakan media sosial menjadi hal yang lumrah dalam komunikasi politik. Hal ini terjadi karena seiring dengan terganggunya media komunikasi publik, ide dan model kampanye konvensional juga merambah ke saluran siber dan membentuk realitas politik siber. Keunikan dari penelitian ini adalah narasi antagonis seperti hoax, etnisitas, agama, ras, antargolongan, dan provokasi dalam kampanye politik Pilpres 2019 di Twitter dari 1 Januari hingga 13 April 2019. Penelitian ini ingin menganalisis secara kritis narasi kampanye politik di Twitter dengan pendekatan Agonism Cyber-politic. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah Multimodal Critical Cyberculture Analysis, bertujuan untuk menganalisis teks multimodal (komponen teks dan gambar), penggunaan hashtag untuk memperkuat narasi politik, dan narasi antagonisme yang berkembang di Twitter dengan mendukung akun Jokowi dan Prabowo. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa akun @jokowi dan @prabowo merupakan akun yang paling banyak terlibat dalam menyebarkan narasi kampanye politik di Twitter. Akun @jokowi menggunakan narasi optimis, sedangkan @prabowo cenderung menggunakan narasi pesimistis. Namun demikian, banyak ditemukan narasi antagonisme, seperti hoax, fake news, propaganda, dan politisasi SARA yang dibocorkan oleh akun anonim. Narasi antagonis ini lebih berkembang dalam wacana politik dunia maya di Twitter. Akibatnya terjadi konflik horizontal dalam kehidupan (politik) masyarakat Indonesia. Komunitas yang diwakili oleh netizen mengalami perpecahan dan membentuk dua kluster. Fakta ini tentu mereduksi makna demokrasi Indonesia yang semestinya substantif menjadi sekadar prosedural. Konsep politik agonistik sendiri sudah menjadi bagian dari praktik demokrasi di Indonesia yang berlandaskan pada falsafah bangsa Indonesia.Kata Kunci: Jokowi, Prabowo, Pilpres 2019, kampanye politik, Twitter, politik siber, demokrasi siber Indonesia

Abstract The aim of the article is to highlight the key elements related to the implementation of new technologies in education from the perspective of the opinions and experiences of educators in the field in Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Finland, Poland, Turkey, and Uruguay. The text compares issues related to attitudes towards the use of new media in education, experiences with different forms of e-learning, and the level of restrictions on the use of smartphones in school. These variables are juxtaposed with the self-assessment of digital competence and how cyberspace is used. The survey was conducted using a standardised survey questionnaire translated into the relevant national languages in the first half of 2019, and involved a sample of 873 teachers representing eight countries. On the basis of the pilot studies it was noted that: 1) Teachers from LAC and EU like to use digital media - this is a constant trend independent of geographical location; 2) Teachers note that new technologies are not always better than analogue didactic aids; 3) Teachers from selected countries (the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Turkey, and Uruguay) have much greater techno-optimism in themselves than teachers from Bolivia, Poland, Finland and Turkey in terms of the impact of ICT on student motivation and engagement; 4) In all countries teachers prefer free online courses (the different forms of e-learning are used most often by those in the Dominican Republic, and the least often in Bolivia and Poland); 5) In each country teachers who highly value their own digital competences and have a positive attitude towards new media use ICT much more actively; 6) There is also a global trend in that the extensive use of cyberspace (typical e-services) appears in combination with the extensive use of various forms of e-learning; 7) Teachers from Ecuador are most likely to want to ban the use of smartphones in schools. The most liberal approach in this respect is taken by the Uruguayans; 8) The knowledge of the conditions related to restricting the use of smartphones goes beyond the analyses related to the style of use and attitude towards new media. This article is the result of pilot studies conducted within the framework of the SMART ECOSYSTEM FOR LEARNING AND INCLUSION project carried out in selected Latin American, Caribbean (LAC) and European (EU) countries.

The article shows that cyberspace is the result of an adult's own goal setting, his choice of sites and other Internet sources (including groups in social networks) for work, activities, education, communication, entertainment etc., also the formation of its socio-cultural virtual space of development. Each adult builds his own space in his own way in accordance with the goal, readiness for self-development, the level of motivation and the presence of a project of self-development. This requires a well-developed strategic intellect and subjectness. Specially designed content contributes to the preservation and development of the mentioned psychological properties of users in crisis life circumstances (like quarantine self-isolation). An experimental study of the subjectness development in crisis quarantine conditions was conducted in the context of design-technological paradigm on the materials of the designed by us on Facebook "Group of psychological support during the coronavirus." The group consistently considered the most important psychological problems of adults in quarantine and self-isolation: psychological features of professional activities in distance format, self-development and self-learning, problems of children distance learning, communication with them about quarantine problems. Much attention was paid to the specifics of experiencing self-isolation and, accordingly, psychological support for different age groups: children, youth, middle-aged and elderly people. Gender and family issues, problems of adults and people with special needs, conflict prevention, etc. were covered. Adequate communication culture with a wide use of mutual respect, humor, optimism and a proactive, subjectness position was specially cultivated in the group discussions. The transformation of users from passive consumers of information to active creators of their own virtual content has contributed to the development of their subjectness in the process of group interaction. It is shown that groups in social networks, professionally designed and organized taking into account the psychological characteristics of both content and communicative interaction, have great psychoprophylactic and development potential.

Activism for socio-political movements has been affected by the progression of technology, enhancing the conditions under which advocates can communicate worldwide. Recently, Tumblr has announced accommodating large numbers of young transgender identified individuals. This article will offer an historical analysis of the progression of gay rights throughout the twentieth century, in comparison with the similar trajectory of the transgender movement now being catalysed by technology. Through discussing key arguments in transgender theory such as the pathologisation of Gender Dysphoria in the DSM; the heterogeneity of the transgender community; and rejecting essentialist ideas of gender: we can begin to understand the need for further integration of the rhetoric of gender fluidity into the public space, in which wrong body discourse and the politics of passing can be deconstructed. By dissecting the history of mainstream media representation of gay identities, we can now understand them to be in the final ‘respect’ stage, progressing through ‘non-recognition’, ‘ridicule’, and ‘regulation’ (Clark, 1969). A further comparison with transgender representation will highlight a non-recognition of the full heterogeneity of their community, which exemplifies the need for public discussion. Tumblr has a unique opportunity, as the biggest cyberspace community of young transgender identified individuals, to impact dialogues created around transgender politics. A discourse analysis of Tumblr’s platform evidences a need to optimise its usability for transgender members. The arguments will conclude proposing that Tumblr has the ability to create a space for influential dialogues that could expand past Tumblr and into wider public spaces.

Of Motivational Art “Live to be outstanding.” What is new media in the age of the ‘rock ‘n’ roll life coach’ Anthony Robbins? There is no need to be ‘spectacular’ anymore. The Situationist critique of the ‘spectacle’ has worn out. That would be my assessment of the Robbins Age we now live in. Audiences are no longer looking for empty entertainment; they need help. Art has to motivate, not question but assist. Today’s aesthetic experience ought to awaken the spiritual side of life. Aesthetics are not there for contemplation only. Art has to become (inter)active and take on the role of ‘coaching.’ In terms of the ‘self mastery’ discourse, the 21st Century artist helps to ‘unleash the power from within.’ No doubt this is going to be achieved with ‘positive energy.’ What is needed is “perverse optimism” (Tibor Kalman). Art has to create, not destroy. A visit to the museum or gallery has to fit into one’s personal development program. Art should consult, not criticize. In order to be a true Experience, the artwork has to initiate through a bodily experience, comparable to the fire walk. It has to be passionate, and should shed its disdain for the viewer, along with its postmodern strategies of irony, reversal and indifference. In short: artists have to take responsibility and stop their silly plays. The performance artist’s perfect day-job: the corporate seminar, ‘trust-building’ and distilling the firm’s ‘core values’ from its ‘human resources’. Self-management ideology builds on the 80s wave of political correctness, liberated from a critical negativism that only questioned existing power structures without giving guidance. As Tony says: “Live with passion!” Emotions have to flow. People want to be fired up and ‘move out of their comfort zone.’ Complex references to intellectual currents within art history are a waste of time. The art experience has to fit in and add to the ‘personal growth’ agenda. Art has to ‘leverage fears’ and promise ‘guaranteed success.’ Part therapist, part consultant, art no longer compensates for a colourless life. Instead it makes the most of valuable resources and is aware of the ‘attention economy’ it operates in. In order to reach such higher plains of awareness it seems unavoidable to admit and celebrate one’s own perverse Existenz. Everyone is a pile of shit and has got dirty hands. Or as Tibor Kalman said: “No one gets to work under ethically pure conditions.” (see Rick Poynor’s <http://www.undesign.org/tiborocity/>). It is at that Zizekian point that art as a counseling practice comes into being. Mapping the Limits of New Media To what extent has the ‘tech wreck’ and following scandals affected our understanding of new media? No doubt there will also be cultural fall-out. Critical new media practices have been slow to respond to both the rise and the fall of dotcommania. The world of IT firms and their volatile valuations on the world’s stock markets seemed light years away from the new media arts galaxy. The speculative hey-day of new media culture was the early-mid 90s, before the rise of the World Wide Web. Theorists and artists jumped eagerly at not-yet-existing and inaccessible technologies such as virtual reality. Cyberspace generated a rich collection of mythologies. Issues of embodiment and identity were fiercely debated. Only five years later, with Internet stocks going through the roof, not much was left of the initial excitement in intellectual and artistic circles. Experimental technoculture missed out on the funny money. Over the last few years there has been a steady stagnation of new media culture, its concepts and its funding. With hundreds of millions of new users flocking onto the Net, the arts could no longer keep up and withdrew to their own little world of festivals, mailing lists and workshops. Whereas new media arts institutions, begging for goodwill, still portray artists as working at the forefront of technological developments, collaborating with state of the art scientists, the reality is a different one. Multi-disciplinary goodwill is at an all time low. At best, the artist’s new media products are ‘demo design’ as described by Peter Lunenfeld in Snap to Grid. Often it does not even reach that level. New media art, as defined by its few institutions, rarely reaches audiences outside of its own subculture. What in positive terms could be described as the heroic fight for the establishment of a self-referential ‘new media arts system’ through a frantic differentiation of works, concepts and traditions, may as well be classified as a dead-end street. The acceptance of new media by leading museums and collectors will simply not happen. Why wait a few decades anyway? The majority of the new media art works on display at ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Linz Ars Electronica Center, ICC in Tokyo or the newly opened Australian Centre for the Moving Image are hopeless in their innocence, being neither critical nor radically utopian in approach. It is for that reason that the new media arts sector, despite its steady growth, is getting increasingly isolated, incapable of addressing the issues of today’s globalized world. It is therefore understandable that the contemporary (visual) arts world is continuing the decades old silent boycott of interactive new media works in galleries, biennales and shows such as Documenta. A critical reassessment of the role of arts and culture within today’s network society seems necessary. Let’s go beyond the ‘tactical’ intentions of the players involved. This is not a blame game. The artist-engineer, tinkering away on alternative human-machine interfaces, social software, or digital aesthetics has effectively been operating in a self-imposed vacuum. Over the last few decades both science and business have successfully ignored the creative community. Even worse, artists have actively been sidelined in the name of ‘usability’. The backlash movement against web design, led by usability guru Jakob Nielsen, is a good example of this trend. Other contributing factors may have been fear of corporate dominance by companies such as AOL/Time Warner and Microsoft. Lawrence Lessig argues that innovation of the Internet itself is in danger. In the meanwhile the younger generation is turning its back from new media arts questions and operates as anti-corporate activists, if at all engaged. Since the crash the Internet has rapidly lost its imaginative attraction. File swapping and cell phones can only temporarily fill the vacuum. It would be foolish to ignore this. New media have lost their magic spell; the once so glamorous gadgets are becoming part of everyday life. This long-term tendency, now in a phase of acceleration, seriously undermines the future claim of new media altogether. Another ‘taboo’ issue in new media is generationalism. With video and expensive interactive installations being the domain of the ‘68 baby boomers, the generation of ‘89 has embraced the free Internet. But the Net turned out to be a trap for them. Whereas real assets, positions and power remains in the hands of the ageing baby boomers, the gamble of its predecessors on the rise of new media did not materialize. After venture capital has melted away, there is still no sustainable revenue system in place for the Internet. The slow working education bureaucracies have not yet grasped the new media malaise. Universities are still in the process of establishing new media departments. But that will come to a halt at some point. The fifty-something tenured chairs and vice-chancellors must feel good about their persistent sabotage. ‘What’s so new about new media anyway? Technology was hype after all, promoted by the criminals of Enron and WorldCom. It’s enough for students to do a bit of email and web surfing, safeguarded within a filtered and controlled intranet…’ It is to counter this cynical reasoning that we urgently need to analyze the ideology of the greedy 90s and its techno-libertarianism. If we don’t disassociate new media quickly from that decade, if we continue with the same rhetoric, the isolation of the new media sector will sooner or later result in its death. Let’s transform the new media buzz into something more interesting altogether – before others do it for us.The Will to Subordinate to Science The dominant wing of Western ‘new media arts’ lacks a sense of superiority, sovereignty, determination and direction. One can witness a tendency towards ‘digital inferiority’ at virtually every cyber-event. Artists, critics and curators have made themselves subservient to technology – and ‘life science’ in particular. This ideological stand has grown out of an ignorance that cannot be explained easily. We’re talking here about a subtle mentality, almost a taboo. The cult practice between ‘domina’ science and its slaves the new media artists is taking place in backrooms of universities and art institutions, warmly supported by genuinely interested corporate bourgeois elements – board members, professors, science writers and journalists – that set the technocultural agenda. Here we’re not talking about some form of ‘techno celebration.’ New media art is not merely a servant to corporate interests. If only it was that simple. The reproach of new media arts ‘celebrating’ technology is a banality, only stated by outsiders; and the interest in life sciences can easily be sold as a (hidden) longing to take part in science’s supra-human ‘triumph of logos,’ but I won’t do that here. Scientists, for their part, are disdainfully looking down at the vaudeville interfaces and well-meant weirdness of biotech art. Not that they will say anything. But the weak smiles on their faces bespeak a cultural gap light years wide. An exquisite non-communication is at hand here. Performance artist Coco Fusco recently wrote a critique of biotech art on the Nettime mailinglist (January 26, 2003). “Biotech artists have claimed that they are redefining art practice and therefore the old rules don't apply to them.” For Fusco bioart’s “heroic stance and imperviousness to criticism sounds a bit hollow and self-serving after a while, especially when the demand for inclusion in mainstream art institutions, art departments in universities, art curricula, art world money and art press is so strong.” From this marginal position, its post-human dreams of transcending the body could better be read as desires to transcend its own marginality, being neither recognized as ‘visual arts’ nor as ‘science.’ Coco Fusco: “I find the attempts by many biotech art endorsers to celebrate their endeavor as if it were just about a scientific or aesthetic pursuit to be disingenuous. Its very rhetoric of transcendence of the human is itself a violent act of erasure, a master discourse that entails the creation of ‘slaves’ as others that must be dominated.” OK, but what if all this remains but a dream, prototypes of human-machine interfaces that, like demo-design, are going nowhere? The isolated social position of the new media arts in this type of criticism is not taken into consideration. Biotech art has to be almighty in order for the Fusco rhetoric to function. Coco Fusco rightly points at artists that “attend meetings with ‘real’ scientists, but in that context they become advisors on how to popularize science, which is hardly what I would call a critical intervention in scientific institutions.” Artists are not ‘better scientists’ and the scientific process is not a better way of making art than any other, Fusco writes. She concludes: “Losing respect for human life is certainly the underbelly of any militaristic adventure, and lies at the root of the racist and classist ideas that have justified the violent use of science for centuries. I don't think there is any reason to believe that suddenly, that kind of science will disappear because some artists find beauty in biotech.” It remains an open question where radical criticism of (life) science has gone and why the new media (arts) canon is still in such a primitive, regressive stage. Links http://www.undesign.org/tiborocity/ Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Lovink, Geert. "Fragments on New Media Arts and Science" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/10-fragments.php>. APA Style Lovink, G. (2003, Aug 26). Fragments on New Media Arts and Science. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/10-fragments.php>

This paper provides embedded, reflective practice-based insight arising from my experience collaborating to produce online and print-on-demand editions of a magazine showcasing the photography of members of haphazart! Contemporary Abstracts group (hereafter referred to as haphazart!). The group’s online visual, textual and activity-based practices via the photo sharing social networking site Flickr are portrayed as achieving cohesive visual identity. Stylistic analysis of pictures in support of this claim is not attempted. Rather negotiation, that Elliot has previously described in M/C Journal as innate in collaboration, is identified as the unifying factor. However, the collaborators’ adherence to Flickr’s communication platform proves problematic in the editorial context. Some technical incoherence with possible broader cultural implications is encountered during the process of repurposing images from screen to print. A Scan of Relevant Literature The photographic gaze perceives and captures objects which seem to ‘carry within them ready-made’ a work of art. But the reminiscences of the gaze are only made possible by knowing and associating with groups that define a tradition. The list of valorised subjects is not actually defined with reference to a culture, but rather by familiarity with a limited group. (Chamboredon 144) As part of the array of socio-cultural practices afforded by Web 2.0 interoperability, sites of produsage (Bruns) are foci for studies originating in many disciplines. Flickr provides a rich source of data that researchers interested in the interface between the technological and the social find useful to analyse. Access to the Flickr application programming interface enables quantitative researchers to observe a variety of means by which information is propagated, disseminated and shared. Some findings from this kind of research confirm the intuitive. For example, Negoecsu et al. find that “a large percentage of users engage in sharing with groups and that they do so significantly” ("Analyzing Flickr Groups" 425). They suggest that Flickr’s Groups feature appears to “naturally bring together two key aspects of social media: content and relations.” They also find evidence for what they call hyper-groups, which are “communities consisting of groups of Flickr groups” ("Flickr Hypergroups" 813). Two separate findings from another research team appear to contradict each other. On one hand, describing what they call “social cascades,” Cha et al. claim that “content in the form of ideas, products, and messages spreads across social networks like a virus” ("Characterising Social Cascades"). Yet in 2009 they claim that homocity and reciprocity ensure that “popularity of pictures is localised” ("Measurement-Driven Analysis"). Mislove et al. reflect that the affordances of Flickr influence the growth patterns they observe. There is optimism shared by some empiricists that through collation and analysis of Flickr tag data, the matching of perceptual structures of images and image annotation techniques will yield ontology-based taxonomy useful in automatic image annotation and ultimately, the Semantic Web endeavour (Kennedy et al.; Su et al.; Xu et al.). Qualitative researchers using ethnographic interview techniques also find Flickr a valuable resource. In concluding that the photo sharing hobby is for many a “serious leisure” activity, Cox et al. propose that “Flickr is not just a neutral information system but also value laden and has a role within a wider cultural order.” They also suggest that “there is genuinely greater scope for individual creativity, releasing the individual to explore their own identity in a way not possible with a camera club.” Davies claims that “online spaces provide an arena where collaboration over meanings can be transformative, impacting on how individuals locate themselves within local and global contexts” (550). She says that through shared ways of describing and commenting on images, Flickrites develop a common criticality in their endeavour to understand images, each other and their world (554).From a psychologist’s perspective, Suler observes that “interpersonal relationships rarely form and develop by images alone” ("Image, Word, Action" 559). He says that Flickr participants communicate in three dimensions: textual (which he calls “verbal”), visual, and via the interpersonal actions that the site affords, such as Favourites. This latter observation can surely be supplemented by including the various games that groups configure within the constraints of the discussion forums. These often include submissions to a theme and voting to select a winning image. Suler describes the place in Flickr where one finds identity as one’s “cyberpsychological niche” (556). However, many participants subscribe to multiple groups—45.6% of Flickrites who share images share them with more than 20 groups (Negoescu et al., "Analyzing Flickr Groups" 420). Is this a reflection of the existence of the hyper-groups they describe (2009) or, of the ranging that people do in search of a niche? It is also probable that some people explore more than a singular identity or visual style. Harrison and Bartell suggest that there are more interesting questions than why users create media products or what motivates them to do so: the more interesting questions center on understanding what users will choose to do ultimately with [Web2.0] capabilities [...] in what terms to define the success of their efforts, and what impact the opportunity for individual and collaborative expression will have on the evolution of communicative forms and character. (167) This paper addresseses such questions. It arises from a participatory observational context which differs from that of the research described above. It is intended that a different perspective about online group-based participation within the Flickr social networking matrix will avail. However, it will be seen that the themes cited in this introductory review prove pertinent. Context As a university teacher of a range of subjects in the digital media field, from contemporary photomedia to social media to collaborative multimedia practice, it is entirely appropriate that I embed myself in projects that engage, challenge and provide me with relevant first-hand experience. As an academic I also undertake and publish research. As a practicing new media artist I exhibit publically on a regular basis and consider myself semi-professional with respect to this activity. While there are common elements to both approaches to research, this paper is written more from the point of view of ‘reflective practice’ (Holmes, "Reconciling Experimentum") rather than ‘embedded ethnography’ (Pink). It is necessarily and unapologetically reflexive. Abstract Photography Hyper-Group A search of all Flickr groups using the query “abstract” is currently likely to return around 14,700 results. However, only in around thirty of them does the group name, its stated rules and, the stream of images that flow through the pool arguably reflect a sense of collective concept and aesthetic that is coherently abstract. This loose complex of groups comprises a hyper-group. Members of these groups often have co-memberships, reciprocal contacts, and regularly post images to a range of groups and comment on others’ posts to be found throughout. Given that one of Flickr’s largest groups, Black and White, currently has around 131,150 members and hosts 2,093,241 items in its pool, these abstract special interest groups are relatively small. The largest, Abstract Photos, has 11,338 members and hosts 89,306 items in its pool. The group that is the focus of this paper, haphazart!, currently has 2,536 members who have submitted 53,309 items. The group pool is more like a constantly flowing river because the most recently added images are foremost. Older images become buried in an archive of pages which cannot be reverse accessed at a rate greater than the seven pages linked from a current view. A member’s presence is most immediate through images posted to a pool. This structural feature of Flickr promotes a desire for currency; a need to post regularly to maintain presence. Negotiating Coherence to the Abstract The self-managing social dynamics in groups has, as Suler proposes to be the case for individuals, three dimensions: visual, textual and action. A group integrates the diverse elements, relationships and values which cumulatively constitute its identity with contributions from members in these dimensions. First impressions of that identity are usually derived from the group home page which consists of principal features: the group name, a selection of twelve most recent posts to the pool, some kind of description, a selection of six of the most recent discussion topics, and a list of rules (if any). In some of these groups, what is considered to constitute an abstract photographic image is described on the group home page. In some it is left to be contested and becomes the topic of ongoing forum debates. In others the specific issue is not discussed—the images are left to speak for themselves. Administrators of some groups require that images are vetted for acceptance. In haphazart! particular administrators dutifully delete from the pool on a regular basis any images that they deem not to comply with the group ethic. Whether reasons are given or not is left to the individual prosecutor. Mostly offending images just disappear from the group pool without trace. These are some of the ways that the coherence of a group’s visual identity is established and maintained. Two groups out of the abstract photography hyper-group are noteworthy in that their discussion forums are particularly active. A discussion is just the start of a new thread and may have any number of posts under it. At time of writing Abstract Photos has 195 discussions and haphazart! — the most talkative by this measure—has 333. Haphazart! invites submissions of images to regularly changing themes. There is always lively and idiosyncratic banter in the forum over the selection of a theme. To be submitted an image needs to be identified by a specific theme tag as announced on the group home page. The tag can be added by the photographer themselves or by anyone else who deems the image appropriate to the theme. An exhibition process ensues. Participant curators search all Flickr items according to the theme tag and select from the outcome images they deem to most appropriately and abstractly address the theme. Copies of the images together with comments by the curators are posted to a dedicated discussion board. Other members may also provide responses. This activity forms an ongoing record that may serve as a public indicator of the aesthetic that underlies the group’s identity. In Abstract Photos there is an ongoing discussion forum where one can submit an image and request that the moderators rule as to whether or not the image is ‘abstract’. The same group has ongoing discussions labelled “Hall of Appropriate” where worthy images are reposted and celebrated and, “Hall of Inappropriate” where images posted to the group pool have been removed and relegated because abstraction has been “so far stretched from its definition that it now resides in a parallel universe” (Askin). Reasons are mostly courteously provided. In haphazart! a relatively small core of around twelve group members regularly contribute to the group discussion board. A curious aspect of this communication is that even though participants present visually with a ‘buddy icon’ and most with a screen name not their real name, it is usual practice to address each other in discussions by their real Christian names, even when this is not evident in a member’s profile. This seems to indicate a common desire for authenticity. The makeup of the core varies from time to time depending on other activities in a member’s life. Although one or two may be professionally or semi-professionally engaged as photographers or artists or academics, most of these people would likely consider themselves to be “serious amateurs” (Cox). They are internationally dispersed with bias to the US, UK, Europe and Australia. English is the common language though not the natural tongue of some. The age range is approximately 35 to 65 and the gender mix 50/50. The group is three years old. Where Do We Go to from Here? In early January 2009 the haphazart! core was sparked into a frenzy of discussion by a post from a member headed “Where do we go to from here?” A proposal was mooted to produce a ‘book’ featuring images and texts representative of the group. Within three days a new public group with invited membership dedicated to the idea had been established. A smaller working party then retreated to a private Flickr group. Four months later Issue One of haphazart! magazine was available in print-on-demand and online formats. Following however is a brief critically reflective review of some of the collaborative curatorial, editorial and production processes for Issue Two which commenced in early June 2009. Most of the team had also been involved with Issue One. I was the only newcomer and replaced the person who had undertaken the design for Issue One. I was not provided access to the prior private editorial ruminations but apparently the collaborative curatorial and editorial decision-making practices the group had previously established persisted, and these took place entirely within the discussion forums of a new dedicated private Flickr group. Over a five-month period there were 1066 posts in 54 discussions concerning matters such as: change of format from the previous; selection of themes, artists and images; conduct of and editing of interviews; authoring of texts; copyright and reproduction. The idiom of those communications can be described as: discursive, sporadic, idiosyncratic, resourceful, collegial, cooperative, emphatic, earnest and purposeful. The selection process could not be said to follow anything close to a shared manifesto, or articulation of style. It was established that there would be two primary themes: the square format and contributors’ use of colour. Selection progressed by way of visual presentation and counter presentation until some kind of consensus was reached often involving informal votes of preference. Stretching the Limits of the Flickr Social Tools The magazine editorial collaborators continue to use the facilities with which they are familiar from regular Flickr group participation. However, the strict vertically linear format of the Flickr discussion format is particularly unsuited to lengthy, complex, asynchronous, multithreaded discussion. For this purpose it causes unnecessary strain, fatigue and confusion. Where images are included, the forums have set and maximum display sizes and are not flexibly configured into matrixes. Images cannot readily be communally changed or moved about like texts in a wiki. Likewise, the Flickrmail facility is of limited use for specialist editorial processes. Attachments cannot be added. This opinion expressed by a collaborator in the initial, open discussion for Issue One prevailed among Issue Two participants: do we want the members to go to another site to observe what is going on with the magazine? if that’s ok, then using google groups or something like that might make sense; if we want others to observe (and learn from) the process - we may want to do it here [in Flickr]. (Valentine) The opinion appears socially constructive; but because the final editorial process and production processes took place in a separate private forum, ultimately the suggested learning between one issue and the next did not take place. During Issue Two development the reluctance to try other online collaboration tools for the selection processes requiring visual comparative evaluation of images and trials of sequencing adhered. A number of ingenious methods of working within Flickr were devised and deployed and, in my opinion, proved frustratingly impractical and inefficient. The digital layout, design, collation and formatting of images and texts, all took place on my personal computer using professional software tools. Difficulties arose in progressively sharing this work for the purposes of review, appraisal and proofing. Eventually I ignored protests and insisted the team review demonstrations I had converted for sharing in Google Documents. But, with only one exception, I could not tempt collaborators to try commenting or editing in that environment. For example, instead of moving the sequence of images dynamically themselves, or even typing suggestions directly into Google Documents, they would post responses in Flickr. To Share and to Hold From the first imaginings of Issue One the need to have as an outcome something in one’s hands was expressed and this objective is apparently shared by all in the haphazart! core as an ongoing imperative. Various printing options have been nominated, discussed and evaluated. In the end one print-on-demand provider was selected on the basis of recommendation. The ethos of haphazart! is clearly not profit-making and conflicts with that of the printing organisation. Presumably to maintain an incentive to purchase the print copy online preview is restricted to the first 15 pages. To satisfy the co-requisite to make available the full 120 pages for free online viewing a second host that specialises in online presentation of publications is also utilised. In this way haphazart! members satisfy their common desires for sharing selected visual content and ideas with an online special interest audience and, for a physical object of art to relish—with all the connotations of preciousness, fetish, talisman, trophy, and bookish notions of haptic pleasure and visual treasure. The irony of publishing a frozen chunk of the ever-flowing Flickriver, whose temporally changing nature is arguably one of its most interesting qualities, is not a consideration. Most of them profess to be simply satisfying their own desire for self expression and would eschew any critical judgement as to whether this anarchic and discursive mode of operation results in a coherent statement about contemporary photographic abstraction. However there remains a distinct possibility that a number of core haphazart!ists aspire to transcend: popular taste; the discernment encouraged in camera clubs; and, the rhetoric of those involved professionally (Bourdieu et al.); and seek to engage with the “awareness of illegitimacy and the difficulties implied by the constitution of photography as an artistic medium” (Chamboredon 130). Incoherence: A Technical Note My personal experience of photography ranges from the filmic to the digital (Holmes, "Bridging Adelaide"). For a number of years I specialised in facsimile graphic reproduction of artwork. In those days I became aware that films were ‘blind’ to the psychophysical affect of some few particular paint pigments. They just could not be reproduced. Even so, as I handled the dozens of images contributed to haphazart!2, converting them from the pixellated place where Flickr exists to the resolution and gamut of the ink based colour space of books, I was surprised at the number of hue values that exist in the former that do not translate into the latter. In some cases the affect is subtle so that judicious tweaking of colour levels or local colour adjustment will satisfy discerning comparison between the screenic original and the ‘soft proof’ that simulates the printed outcome. In other cases a conversion simply does not compute. I am moved to contemplate, along with Harrison and Bartell (op. cit.) just how much of the experience of media in the shared digital space is incomparably new? Acknowledgement Acting on the advice of researchers experienced in cyberethnography (Bruckman; Suler, "Ethics") I have obtained the consent of co-collaborators to comment freely on proceedings that took place in a private forum. They have been given the opportunity to review and suggest changes to the account. References Askin, Dean (aka: dnskct). “Hall of Inappropriate.” Abstract Photos/Discuss/Hall of Inappropriate, 2010. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.flickr.com/groups/abstractphotos/discuss/72157623148695254/>. Bourdieu, Pierre, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredeon, and Dominique Schnapper. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. 1965. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Bruckman, Amy. Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet. 2002. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html>. Bruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Proceedings: Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology 2006. Perth: Murdoch U, 2006. 275–84. ———, and Mark Bahnisch. Social Media: Tools for User-Generated Content. Vol. 1 – “State of the Art.” Sydney: Smart Services CRC, 2009. Cha, Meeyoung, Alan Mislove, Ben Adams, and Krishna P. Gummadi. “Characterizing Social Cascades in Flickr.” Proceedings of the First Workshop on Online Social Networks. ACM, 2008. 13–18. ———, Alan Mislove, and Krishna P. Gummadi. “A Measurement-Driven Analysis of Information Propagation in the Flickr Social Network." WWW '09: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web. ACM, 2009. 721–730. Cox, A.M., P.D. Clough, and J. Marlow. “Flickr: A First Look at User Behaviour in the Context of Photography as Serious Leisure.” Information Research 13.1 (March 2008). 12 Dec. 2009 ‹http://informationr.net/ir/13-1/paper336.html>. Chamboredon, Jean-Claude. “Mechanical Art, Natural Art: Photographic Artists.” Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Pierre Bourdieu. et al. 1965. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. 129–149. Davies, Julia. “Display, Identity and the Everyday: Self-Presentation through Online Image Sharing.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 28.4 (Dec. 2007): 549–564. Elliott, Mark. “Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work.” M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php>. Harrison, Teresa, M., and Brea Barthel. “Wielding New Media in Web 2.0: Exploring the History of Engagement with the Collaborative Construction of Media Products.” New Media & Society 11.1-2 (2009): 155–178. Holmes, Ashley. “‘Bridging Adelaide 2001’: Photography and Hyperimage, Spanning Paradigms.” VSMM 2000 Conference Proceedings. International Society for Virtual Systems and Multimedia, 2000. 79–88. ———. “Reconciling Experimentum and Experientia: Reflective Practice Research Methodology for the Creative Industries”. Speculation & Innovation: Applying Practice-Led Research in the Creative Industries. Brisbane: QUT, 2006. Kennedy, Lyndon, Mor Naaman, Shane Ahern, Rahul Nair, and Tye Rattenbury. “How Flickr Helps Us Make Sense of the World: Context and Content in Community-Contributed Media Collections.” MM’07. ACM, 2007. Miller, Andrew D., and W. Keith Edwards. “Give and Take: A Study of Consumer Photo-Sharing Culture and Practice.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2007. 347–356. Mislove, Alan, Hema Swetha Koppula, Krishna P. Gummadi, Peter Druschel and Bobby Bhattacharjee. “Growth of the Flickr Social Network.” Proceedings of the First Workshop on Online Social Networks. ACM, 2008. 25–30. Negoescu, Radu-Andrei, and Daniel Gatica-Perez. “Analyzing Flickr Groups.” CIVR '08: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval. ACM, 2008. 417–426. ———, Brett Adams, Dinh Phung, Svetha Venkatesh, and Daniel Gatica-Perez. “Flickr Hypergroups.” MM '09: Proceedings of the Seventeenth ACM International Conference on Multimedia. ACM, 2009. 813–816. Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2007. Su, Ja-Hwung, Bo-Wen Wang, Hsin-Ho Yeh, and Vincent S. Tseng. “Ontology–Based Semantic Web Image Retrieval by Utilizing Textual and Visual Annotations.” 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology – Workshops. 2009. Suler, John. “Ethics in Cyberspace Research: Consent, Privacy and Contribution.” The Psychology of Cyberspace. 1996. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html>. ———. “Image, Word, Action: Interpersonal Dynamics in a Photo-Sharing Community.” Cyberpsychology & Behavior 11.5 (2008): 555–560. Valentine, Mark. “HAPHAZART! Magazine/Discuss/image selections…” [discussion post]. 2009. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.flickr.com/groups/haphazartmagazin/discuss/72157613147017532/>. Xu, Hongtao, Xiangdong Zhou, Mei Wang, Yu Xiang, and Baile Shi. “Exploring Flickr’s Related Tags for Semantic Annotation of Web Images.” CIVR ’09. ACM, 2009.

Paul Virilio. The Information Bomb. London: Verso, 2000. 145 pp., ISBN: 1-85984-745-5 (hardback). Born in Paris in 1932, the French political and 'technocultural' theorist Paul Virilio is the leading exponent of the idea that 'dromology' (the logic of speed) stands at the centre of the political formation and technocultural transformation of the contemporary world. Virilio is an architect of the 'Brutalist' school and political 'critic of the art of technology' as well as a Husserlian phenomenologist and post-Einsteinian analyst of technoculture. In recent years Virilio has developed his own political approach to the technocultural and experiential effects of speed and technoscience on the organisation of cyberspace and cyberculture. It is an approach that is increasingly being adopted and adapted by a variety of pre-eminent thinkers on the Left such as Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek and Andre Gorz. As the son of a Breton mother and an Italian communist father in Nazi-occupied France, Virilio spent the majority of World War II as an anxious evacuee in Nantes. In 1950 he converted to Christianity in the fraternity of 'worker-priests'. Virilio was educated at the L'École des Métiers d'Art in Paris and first became a craftsman in stained glass before becoming a sort of intellectual provocateur and co-editor of Architecture Principe, an architectural group and occasional review devoted to radical political and architectural experimentation. Between 1963 and 1966 Virilio dedicated his time to studying the architecture of war and to the construction of the 'bunker church' of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay at Nevers. Virilio became politically active during the 1968 May revolt and this led to an irrevocable split with his partner in Architecture Principe, the architect Claude Parent. In 1969 Virilio was instated as a professor of architecture at the École Speciale d'Architecture at the behest of the students there, a position he occupied until his retirement in 1997. Virilio's major work is Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1986), written, he maintains, to raise the political question of speed as the hidden side of economic development. Virilio's recent texts such as Open Sky (1997) and now The Information Bomb can therefore be regarded as important advances in his current work on the politics of techno, or, cyberculture. As the son of a Breton mother and an Italian communist father in Nazi-occupied France, Virilio spent the majority of World War II as an anxious evacuee in Nantes. In 1950 he converted to Christianity in the fraternity of 'worker-priests'. Virilio was educated at the L'École des Métiers d'Art in Paris and first became a craftsman in stained glass before becoming a sort of intellectual provocateur and co-editor of Architecture Principe, an architectural group and occasional review devoted to radical political and architectural experimentation. Between 1963 and 1966 Virilio dedicated his time to studying the architecture of war and to the construction of the 'bunker church' of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay at Nevers. Virilio became politically active during the 1968 May revolt and this led to an irrevocable split with his partner in Architecture Principe, the architect Claude Parent. In 1969 Virilio was instated as a professor of architecture at the École Speciale d'Architecture at the behest of the students there, a position he occupied until his retirement in 1997. Virilio's major work is Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1986), written, he maintains, to raise the political question of speed as the hidden side of economic development. Virilio's recent texts such as Open Sky (1997) and now The Information Bomb can therefore be regarded as important advances in his current work on the politics of techno, or, cyberculture. Virilio's newest political and technocultural work, The Information Bomb, is set to become an important text of intellectual and dromological analysis. On its opening page Virilio quotes Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist, chief architect of quantum mechanics and founder of the 'uncertainty principle': 'No one can say what will be "real" for people when the wars which are now beginning come to an end'. Briefly, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that if a simultaneous calculation is made of the location and speed of a particle then, no matter how faithful the calculations, there is always an uncertainty in the values acquired. It deals with the simultaneous calculation of energy and time. The uncertainty occurs because the act of perceiving the system interferes with it in an unpredictable manner. But uncertainty is only significant at the atomic and subatomic levels and at these levels throws the principle of causality into confusion. Virilio's The Information Bomb therefore examines the dromological and uncertain relationships between the 'reality' of the war universe, speed and, crucially, our perception of its main causalities. The key question and the first sentence of Virilio's book is: 'The civilianisation or militarisation of science?' Virilio answers by describing what he calls the catastrophes of postmodern technoscience and globalisation, Americanisation, biotechnology, Internet pornography and the advertising industry in the most uncompromising terms. Virilio's riposte to the question is already contained in the book's title. This is because, for him, since the end of World War II, the militarisation of science and the construction of two kinds of bomb have overshadowed civilian life. The first is the atom bomb, 'which is capable of using the energy of radioactivity to smash matter'. The second is the information bomb, 'which is capable of using the interactivity of information to wreck the peace between nations'. Virilio delineates the existence of the information bomb, of an explosion of mediated misery around the world, in terms of the deterioration of language and the sheer seductive power of TV and computer screens, the acceleration of history and the emergence of new inter-generational conflicts. Virilio forcefully argues that the advent of the information bomb requires the creation of a new type of social deterrence if nations are to avoid the 'fission' of their 'social cores' as they enter into the uncertain and often shocking world of chronopolitics. For this is a topsy-turvy world where neo-liberalism confronts 'cyberfeminism' and the military-scientific complex contemplates the arrival of 'cyberwar' and 'grey ecology' (the pollution of distances) under the sign of cinematic disinformation from Hollywood and the technological transformation of work through the introduction of mobile phones and 'zero-hour' contracts. Or, as Virilio says at one point in The Information Bomb: in today's 'dromocratic' capitalism, when the biotech corporation calls, 'you come running'. It would, though, be incorrect to view Virilio's political opposition to the uncritical acceptance of technoculture and the explosion of the information bomb as a wholly pessimistic stance on the spread of neo-liberalism in realms such as the multimedia. Virilio's work is, for example, in no way analogous to that of Baudrillard, the intellectual high priest of postmodernism. In truth, Virilio manifestly frames his recent writings in relation to a guarded optimism concerning what I have elsewhere called his 'hypermodern' technocultural theory: a theory involved with the acceleration and dislocation of modern forms of thought about the contemporary world and how it is depicted. It is therefore perfectly plausible to derive from Virilio's dromological texts a scientifically 'uncertain' conception of 'reality' that focusses on the concepts of hypermodernism and 'hypermodernity'. The latter is an idea centred on coming to terms with the speeding-up of historical processes and a critical analysis of modernity based on a political perception of technoculture that is catastrophic. In this way, Virilio typically conceives of the developments he documents in The Information Bomb not as the psychoanalytic problems of progress but as the technoscientific and 'excessive' displacement of them. It is a conceptualisation that is evident in his dromological and dynamic writings on the subject of 'information superhighways' and the 'full range of communications disturbances acquired over the recent centuries of technology'. 'In this field', Virilio says, progress 'acts like a forensic scientist on us' since it violates 'each bodily orifice'. But such 'brutal incursions' do not merely influence individuals; they colonise them. For Virilio, then, progress 'heaps up, accumulates and condenses in each of us the full range of (visual, social, psycho-motor, affective, sexual, etc.) detrital disorders which it has taken on with each innovation, each with their full complement of specific injuries'. All criticism of technology having disappeared, 'we have slid unconsciously from pure technology to techno-culture and, lastly, to the dogmatism of a totalitarian techno-cult...' As can be ascertained from the above examples, Virilio's work sits uneasily with almost all the prevailing paradigms and methodological approaches currently on offer. Chasing a multitude of Foucauldian discontinuities and shape-shifting Deleuzian inflected 'lines of flight' simultaneously, The Information Bomb can thus be seen as a reflection of his self-professed 'anarcho-Christianity'. It is a methodological stance, political perspective and religious position Virilio shares to some extent with the author of The Technological Society (1964), the late Jacques Ellul. Viewed from this angle, Virilio's oppositional and overtly political writings on the 'hypermodern condition' present a comprehensible methodological outlook. It is, however, an outlook that is somewhat at odds with the political and intellectual terrain occupied by 'transpolitical' postmodernists such as Baudrillard, 'poststructuralist anarchists' like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and the deconstructionist and 'spectral Marxist' Jacques Derrida. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine that Virilio's rather abstract writings in The Information Bomb opposing the rise of neo-liberalism and the hypermodern condition have not touched a nerve in France. Left-leaning theoreticians and the editors of newspapers such as Le Monde Diplomatique regularly pursue Virilio's forthright opinions in the form of articles and interviews on everything from Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992) to his own thoughts on the end of geography and technoculture. Virilio is therefore a very creative political theorist who articulates himself with equal ease in academic and non-specialist technocultural works. Unlike Foucault, Virilio is the personification of the 'engaged intellectual'. Rather than simply opting for the life of a professor of architecture at the École Speciale d' Architecture, Virilio has always chosen to communicate his ideas to as wide an audience as possible, a strategy that earned him a 'National Award for Criticism' in 1987. Virilio's contemporary writings thus necessarily involve a dromological, political and technocultural encounter with the militarisation of science in the shape of the Internet. Even so, unlike Virilio's earlier texts such as Open Sky (1997), in The Information Bomb Virilio does not merely concentrate his gaze on society's apparent need for speed but, decisively, on its present-day extension into pornography and advertising and their integration into the commercialisation of the art world. Describing the 1997 London Royal Academy exhibition entitled 'Sensation' ostensibly held to present young British artists, Virilio suggests that, like many others, in actuality, this exhibition was designed and presented by 'the sex-culture-advertising movement'. This is because the '110 works on display (a portrait of child-murderer Myra Hindley, casts of childlike bodies with mouths replaced by phalluses, etc.) belonged, without exception, to Charles Saatchi, one of Britain's great advertising moguls'. What is at issue here for Virilio is the recognition that, like the need for speed and the example of the Internet, the distinctions between the world of pornography, the world of art and the world of advertising have all but been obliterated in the name of nothing more profound than 'breaking down the last taboos'. However, in Virilio's hypermodern conception of the 'terminal arts', a 'confrontation between a tortured body and an automatic camera' not only signifies the coming of the 'sex-culture-advertising-complex' but, equally importantly, the onset of 'endocolonisation' or, what takes place when militarised technoscience colonises the human body with the aim of reducing every member of humanity that has 'had its day' to the status of a 'specimen'. The political critiques provided by Virilio in The Information Bomb are a welcome development. For, today, it is sometimes all too easy to criticise the discipline of cultural studies for its celebration of political, technological and cultural différance without any corresponding recognition of economic and other inequalities founded on class, gender and race. Moreover, Virilio's fervent and occasionally maniacal critique of the art of technology stands out because it stretches from political and technocultural studies to economic and film studies, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph. Taking in Hollywood directors and obvious film productions such as Jan de Bont's Speed as well as the work of French cinematic pioneers like the Lumière brothers', Virilio's The Information Bomb is an important publication. But, unlike numerous other 'cybercultural' tomes, the significance of this book is derived from the fact that it also manages to extend the scope of political and technocultural studies through the provision of often-abstruse pronouncements such as Kafka's claim that the cinema 'involves putting the eye into uniform'. The political critiques provided by Virilio in The Information Bomb are a welcome development. For, today, it is sometimes all too easy to criticise the discipline of cultural studies for its celebration of political, technological and cultural différance without any corresponding recognition of economic and other inequalities founded on class, gender and race. Moreover, Virilio's fervent and occasionally maniacal critique of the art of technology stands out because it stretches from political and technocultural studies to economic and film studies, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph. Taking in Hollywood directors and obvious film productions such as Jan de Bont's Speed as well as the work of French cinematic pioneers like the Lumière brothers', Virilio's The Information Bomb is an important publication. But, unlike numerous other 'cybercultural' tomes, the significance of this book is derived from the fact that it also manages to extend the scope of political and technocultural studies through the provision of often-abstruse pronouncements such as Kafka's claim that the cinema 'involves putting the eye into uniform'. Yet it would be wrong to think that such an individualistic political and technocultural approach cannot be extended beyond Virilio's own anarcho-Christianity or the writings of Ellul. For example, Virilio's The Art of the Motor (1995) has been an important reference point in the recent writings of imaginative Marxists as distinct as Zizek in The Plague of Fantasies (1997) and Gorz in Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society (1999). It would be difficult to believe that The Information Bomb will not become another significant source in the future works of other creative radicals, offering as it does not only a provisional pathway out of the quicksand of postmodernism but also a way into the sympathies of ordinary people. Firing off political concepts and technocultural neologisms at the speed of light, Virilio's passionately argued texts do not always hit their intended targets. But for anyone seeking a hypermodern critique of the cultural logic of late militarism that ranges from the Internet and the commercialisation of art to endocolonisation and the accident, Virilio's radical political and technocultural theory of speed contained in The Information Bomb is just what you have been waiting for. Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Armitage. "The Uncertainty Principle: Paul Virilio's 'The Information Bomb'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/virilio.php>. Chicago style: John Armitage, "The Uncertainty Principle: Paul Virilio's 'The Information Bomb'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/virilio.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Armitage. (2000) The uncertainty principle: Paul Virilio's 'The information bomb'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/virilio.php> ([your date of access]).

Virtual reality has introduced what is literally a new dimension of reality to daily life. But it is not without controversy. Indeed, some say that a collision is inevitable between those passionately involved in the computer industry and those increasingly alienated from (and often replaced by) its applications. Opinions range from the cyberpunk attitude of Wired magazine and Bill Gates's commercial optimism to the violent opposition of the Unabomber. Now, with Virtual Realism, readers have a thought-provoking guide to the "cyberspace backlash" debate and the implications of cyberspace for our culture. Michael Heim offers a comprehensive introduction to virtual reality and a provocative commentary on its present and future impact on our lives. Heim describes the fascinating and important industrial and military uses of virtual reality, as well as its artistic and entertainment applications. He argues that we must balance the idealist's enthusiasm for computerized life with the need to ground ourselves more deeply in primary reality. This "uneasy balance" he calls virtual realism.

Using live, synchronous time effectively in an instructor-led e-learning course requires a clear understanding of the dynamics of real-time, live interactivity. Synchronous interactivity enables live learning, demonstrations, collaborations, lab simulations, human-driven simulations, desktop simulations, live multi-data-stream events, and plenty of valuable learning and training. These may include webinars, online conventions, chat sessions, interactive television, and interactive lectures in CTE. These synchronous events may be non-human-facilitated or human-facilitated. To maximize synchronous time requires pedagogical preparation and the training of participants, setting the pace, troubleshooting technological challenges, and striving to create accessibility pre-, during- and post-event. This chapter will address some strategies for using live sessions in career and technical education to optimize the synergies of real-time.