Hey Folks,
This is making its way around the cybersphere and so might come at you from a couple different directions. Please forward to all interested parties.
Tnx
-r
Remote Control: communication perspectives on connection, interaction, intervention and control at-a-distance
Seeking several additional chapters to complete a package being sent to two prospective publishers for review.
Book Description and Rationale:
>From traditional letter writing, print media, radio, and TV, to Email, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Skype, to Blackboard, Blackwolf, and a variety of remote controlled physical apparatuses, contributors investigate how we seek to engage (and/or engage with) others, and how these mechanisms, platforms and applications enable and inhibit our efforts to connect, interact, communicate, understand, intervene and/or control at-a-distance. Contributors consider different facets of human interaction through time and around the world to prompt and preserve remote connections (one-way, two-way, multi-way). What are we preserving and what are we giving up in our efforts to "get in touch"? Scenarios of communion and embodiment, and disembodiment and alienation are, no doubt, in the offing.
How and why have various communicative systems, applications and mechanisms emerged over time? Contributors to this cutting-edge collection of essays, analyses and investigations critically assess a number of technologies being deployed on the ground, in the air, and online -- including message answering systems, remote address systems, security tools of various sorts, and learning management systems like Blackboard and its ilk. Additional examples to be discussed include the explosive use of drones and other remote controlled robots and AI apparatuses abroad and at home to ostensibly reduce collateral damage, curtail the deployment of costly human resources at various points along the process chain, or simply to avoid the dangers of putting "boots on the ground." This rich, interdisciplinary collection of essays promises to help shed new light on our potential futures of communication and action at-a-distance based upon patterns of innovation and diffusion witnessed to
date.
To get a sense of where this project is headed, the following is a list of working titles and abstracts for chapters now in hand (and in no particular order):
A Waiting Room Without Walls: Paging, Pagers, and the Future of Mobile Communication
This chapter fills a gap within radio, telephone, and mobile communications history. In doing so I turn an eye toward recent mobile innovations to argue that future networked society is likely to see an intensification of fundamental remote communication practices: individual address, alerts, and recorded messages. I use the history of pagers, one of the earliest remote communications devices, to explain these practices and discuss their implications for the future of networked communication. First, unlike the landline telephone, individual pager users are identified with their own remote communications device. Without the excuse of being away from the phone, they are accountable for responding to calls. Second, pagers use beeps and vibrations as a form of message notification. The meaning of these alerts can differ with each connection. Is it an emergency? Is someone thinking of me? Lastly, pagers rely on messages rather than live conversation. Missed phone calls are never lost; they become messages waiting return. These three functions-individual address, alerts, and recorded messages-are central to understanding modern remote communication and connection, and they provide hints for understanding the shape of things to come.
Chained to the Dialer, or Frederick Taylor Reaches Out and Touches Someone
This essay takes an autoethnographic approach in considering strategies of disconnecting and unplugging while working in a call center in the collections department of a major bank. It is illustrative to consider cases in which our connections are not only metaphorical, but also physical. I focus on three facets of call center work: the environment, the potential for surveillance, and the strategies of resistance employed by the workers. I explore the ways in which the workplace has changed from physical, manual labor to emotional labor while still retrieving and maintaining the mentality of the assembly line and Taylorism with its emphasis on efficiency. I argue that the material realities of such a workplace illustrate potential problems surrounding work in the information society. Such accounts provide a stark counterpoint to the often celebratory discourse surrounding information work.
Remote Control from the C-Suite: Chief Knowledge Officers, Chief Learning Officers, and Globalized Corporate Noopower
This essay draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Tiziana Terranova, and Maurizio Lazzarato to theorize noopower. Noopower is a mix of sovereign power, discipline, and modulatory power that takes as its object thought, memory, perception, and knowledge. As such, it is a useful concept for exploring the ways in which corporations shape employee perceptions and behaviors within and throughout globalized firms. The central objects of this paper are the literatures and practices associated with the positions of the Chief Knowledge Officer and the Chief Learning Officer in many contemporary corporations. As I argue, the business literature that defines these "C-Level" officers must also define phenomena such as knowledge, learning, culture, and corporate memory. As it does so, the literature also idealizes and valorizes certain practices as "knowledge work" and "learning" while delimiting others seen as valueless. Thus, the CKO and CLO positions are central to the
processes by which power and control permeates throughout global corporations, especially as that form of power shapes employees' thoughts, practices, and memories via training, enculturation, modulation, or simply by firing. In sum, the CKO and CLO positions are institutionalizations of noopower; studying them shines light on other forms of noopower as they continue to emerge in media and education contexts.
Teaching and Learning (in) the Surveillance State: Educational Policy and Political Action as a Mechanism of Remote Control
Using intersectionality as a lens to deconstruct the implicit power dynamics in recent actions by policy actors including individual politicians, state governments, federal governments, and non-governmental actors, this paper demonstrates the myriad ways that educational policy functions as means of remote control. Further, it suggests that, through the extension of remote control into the educational arena-- a time and space that research identifies as a key cultural transmission zone-- children and young adults are desensitized and habituated to the reality of centralized knowledge production and dissemination. To make this argument, this paper focuses on two separate but inextricably linked sets of examples: First, it explores a series of policy initiatives designed to shape the behavior of teachers (e.g. performance-based funding, mandatory accountability systems, value-added teacher evaluation). Second, it examines policies that intend to structure the form and substance of knowledge to which students will have access (e.g. the adoption of abstinence-only sex education, legislation designed to require the teaching of creationism, efforts to restrict instruction in revisionist and/or social history). Through this analysis, remote control via educational policy is seen as reflecting and reinforcing the white, patricarchal, social elite dividend.
Seeing (and feeling) at-a-distance: hooking up, and hooking in with the EMX/Blackwolf Remote Surveillance System.
This chapter details a phenomenological analysis of the EMX (formerly Blackwolf) remote surveillance system. I interrogate the nature of perception, intentionality, interpretation and action at-a-distance as the EMX, and its analogs, continue to be deployed around the country and world at an almost feverish pace. Several decades ago philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked what it is like to be a bat. By the same token, we might ask what it's like to be sitting in bed in Boston, controlling an EMX system in south-western Texas, to monitor the activity of several people walking along the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. With broad-spectrum optical enhancements, including high resolution infrared/night vision, what is occurring now, and what does the future hold for this kind of being and seeing in the world? Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach, and McLuhan's "prosthesis thesis" provide the theoretical underpinning for an intimate analysis of these new developments. Recent non-governmental applications of the EMX surveillance system are also discussed.
Mediascape as Battlefield: Infrastructure Convergence and Smart War
Using a number of technologies that manage media, energy, data, and services, today's "smart" consumers rely on the manipulation and modulation of multiple infrastructures to participate in connected life. Informationalization -- the integration of information into previously "dumb" processes -- makes this negotiation possible. This paper focuses on one of the dark sides of infrastructure convergence: cyberwarfare. After reviewing recent developments in cyberwarfare law and policy, I argue that cyberwarfare and cyberdefense are emerging topics that not only warrant, but further demand our attention as communication scholars.
Increased emphases on Visual Imagery over Aural Messaging: Implications for U.S. Military Cultural Initiatives
The evolution of television and other "new" communication technologies - especially those associated with the Internet - have resulted in the visual domain receiving much more emphasis than the aural (hearing) domain. Thus, the visual dominates at the expense of the aural and the imagination presides over critical thinking. This report addresses the increased emphasis on visual imagery over aural messages as it relates to U.S. Army cultural initiatives in varied contexts. Familiarity with this phenomenon will benefit those in positions to enhance cultural understanding given the way increased emphasis on the visual domain can result in a progressive dilution of critical thinking about cultural variables when visual images have significant impact upon the development of cultural literacy and awareness. Illustrations regarding these developments will be drawn from different military contexts, as well as more general socio-cultural scenarios.
Absentee Warriors, Absent War: Ecologies of Representation on Planet Drone
The dramatic growth of drone warfare in the last decade has meant the arrival of a new kind of war imagery in civilian life: the view through the drone camera. As such, the drone is not simply a weapon but also a new medium for representing conflict. The article explores the ways this imagery has been selected, interpreted, framed and put to use in public and popular culture. In addition to exploring how these practices of looking fit within the larger history of war imagery, three prominent features of 'drone vision' are identified: the tendency to legitimize covert military operations, the promotion of consumer interactivity in the drone war and the militarizing of domestic space.
CALL FOR ADDITIONAL CHAPTERS RE:
To round out the emerging collection of projects, there is particular interest in work investigating the use of Point of Purchase (POP) technology, consumer/user mining and profiling mechanisms, data mining, sentiment analysis and other applications of "big data," remote driving, crash-avoidance and back-up systems, remote car/boat/home access, hacking and jacking practices, among other such manifestations.
Kindly send chapter abstracts, outlines, drafts or even percolating project proposals to: robert_macdougall(a)curry.edu no later than August 31, 2013.
Robert MacDougall
Professor, Communication/Media Studies
Coordinator, Video Game Concentration
Coordinator, Faculty Center
for Professional Development
and Curriculum Innovation
Curry College
65a Atherton St.
Milton, MA 02186-2395 USA
Office Ph: 617-333-2265
Skype: rc.macdougall
