Metamedium, net economy and software culture
A social history of internet telephony
The
last two decades of human history have projected us in a special life
condition in which the so-called “cultural software” – ideas,
practices, tools and languages supported and proceduralized by software
working with and on networks – increasingly mediates our
relationships with the people and world. Consequently, among
salient characteristics of actual telecommunication scenery there
is a tumultuous ongoingness of services and experiential spaces created
by digital remixes that both blending traditional media and
opening them to new functional and expressive possibilities, creating
links, selections and hybridisations of resources and contents
owned by heterogeneous connected communities. Despite its apparent specificity, the story of integration between telephone and internet shows a fundamental step in our digital turn, timely underlying its sustainability and archetypal logics. Facing newism with the tension of a less or more recent past, such episodes help us to understand many of elements feeds actual debates and social networking phenomenon, revealing the roots of a systemic process, of which it preserves a vivid and realistic picture of contest and contingencies because snapshot was taken when “corpse was still warm”
(2011, Naples, Liguori)
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Luciano
PetullàTangling with media and computer liquidity
The dimensions of ubiquitous computing and the grasp of world
Information and communication devices are steadily inserted into the tissue of economy, culture, and society, involving every relationship we engage with surrounding realities regardless space and time, provoking very intimate and personal interactions with all sort of ideas, objects, places and events.
Media and computers liquidity is a technological way to accentuate a short circuit between our nude life and the variegate “external” world. The availability of cross-media resources, their pulverization and diffusion into matters, bodies and the very air we breathe, together with their increasing user-friendliness and project plasticity, is a participating element of the wider socio-cultural reshuffling of post-industrial era.
Following a minimal approach starting from concrete examples of ubiquitous info-communication, the book questions combinations that are redefining our substance of people of a network society, as well as the emerging meanings that could appear “alien”, delineating a move that, through a wide work of re-mediation and subjective and social appropriation, tries to overcome the condition of impersonality and eradication of context (dis-embedding) typical of high modernity techno-social systems.
(Lampi di stampa 2009)
Summary, Index and WordCloud
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Luciano
Petullà, Davide
BorrelliThe video cell phone
Genesis and horizons of the phone with images
Although video telephony as a communications system has remained at the margins of the telephonic world, its original idea has stimulated the development of the current platforms of multi-media communications (voice, image, data). The book goes over history from a critical perspective, to analyze socialcultural developments tied to new technological scenarios, asking whether the introduction of visual communication in the latest generations of mobile phones could have the same social and anthropological impact as voice and text messages have achieved in recent years. The approach to the subject is a cross between socio-technical inquiry, anthropological analysis and phenomenological reflection: on par with any and all digital communication devices, the video cell phone is, in fact, a sort of prism with a thousand faces. The work thus invites readers to focus not only on the medium’s creation of images but – by reclaiming its symbolical roots – to pay greater attention to the infinite prospects of its present consequences. The text contains an essay by John Durham Peters.
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Luciano Petullà, an expert on communication and information technologies in relation to their social and cultural contexts, has published L’INTERNET TELEPHONY. STORIA SOCIALE DI UN MEDIUM DELLA NEW ECONOMY (2002) and in 2005 edited the Italian edition of John Durham Peters’ book SPEAKING INTO THE AIR: A HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF COMMUNICATION (2000).
Davide Borrelli, a professor of communication science at the Università degli Studi in Lecce and the Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples, conducts research in the field of the social history of media and the culture industry. He has published several books, including IL FILO DEI DISCORSI. TEORIA E STORIA SOCIALE DEL TELEFONO.
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Luciano
Petullà
The Internet Telephony
The social story of a medium of new economy
(2002, Rubbettino)
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