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)
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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
Nowadays internet telephony or Voice Over Ip is a service that can be used by all internet users since our houses have been linked through broadband connections. At the same time, these kinds of service are speedily migrating beyond originary boundaries exploiting all the opportunities offered in terms of integration between different types of network, fixed and mobile (wifi, edge, umts, etc.). The alliance between Skype and mobile operator Hutchison 3G is a recent example.
In “The Internet Telephony”, a book published in 2002, the success and inevitable expansion of phenomenon has been predicted even if not described in details for all the possible articulations that should be explored, and in some cases realized, further. Yet, essay has had the chance to grasp the phenomenon in progress, recovering stories, personages, documents and discussions that now are, in the lively and perennial changing universe of internet, mostly unavailable and, perhaps, definitively lost, however hardly traceable. Then, the book that was born to understand the origins of phenomenon - including its technical, economical, social and cultural aspects - becomes an almost unique testimony to enter in the real nature of new economy.
Indeed, looking at this recent past we can’t repress our surprise about how a such technological developments – that seemed an appanage of a narrow group of people particularly skilled and stubborn – have entered so naturally in our discourses and, above all, in our practices of life. That is a clear confirm of the fecundity of an open, transversal, thematic approach to the study of information and communication technology, being ICTs expression and constitutive factors of our network society.
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