Ubiquitous Media, Featherstone

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276409103104 2009; 26; 1 Theory Culture Society

Mike Featherstone Ubiquitous Media: An Introduction

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Ubiquitous MediaAn Introduction

Mike Featherstone

THE PAPERS in this special issue have been drawn from the Ubiqui-tous Media: Asian Transformations Conference held at the Universityof Tokyo in July 2007 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Theory,Culture & Society.1 The idea of the conference originated from previouscooperation between Mike Featherstone, Shunya Yoshimi, Scott Lash, CouzeVenn and others, going back to the development work on the Theory, Culture& Society New Encyclopaedia Project (which led to the ProblematizingGlobal Knowledge special issue Featherstone et al., 2006).2 In seekingto grapple with the nature of contemporary knowledge formation, theprocesses of globalization and digitalization became seen as important axesfor making sense of the changes taking place in the production, circulationand practical use of academic and intellectual knowledge today. One of ouraims was to think through the problems of concept formation and knowl-edge classification, in the light of the critiques of Western-centred accountsof the rise of modernity (Featherstone, 2007). Not only in the sense ofattempts to explore alternative genealogies and redress the theft of history,and theoretical-logical accounts driven by dubious notions of superiorWestern cultural resources (see forthcoming TCS special section on JackGoody on Occidentalism and Comparative History [esp. Goody, 2006;Friedman, forthcoming]). But also in the concern to take into account theshifting global balance of power away from the West towards Asia and Chinain particular, which has the potential for the de-stabilization and even thede-classification of Western knowledge along with its universalistic assump-tions of providing generic categories (Featherstone, 1995: ch. 8, 2000,2006). This suggests not only the potential for introducing new content, butshifts in disciplinary structures and sets of theoretical categories. Butadditionally, and more fundamentally, it points to the reconstruction of thearchive, as new sets of relevances come into prominence, which can lead

Theory, Culture & Society 2009 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),Vol. 26(23): 122DOI: 10.1177/0263276409103104

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to the generation of new connections and a different set of classifications(Featherstone, 2000, 2006; Foucault, 1970, 1972). If the archive can beseen to stand behind all research, then we need to enquire into the processesleading to the globalization of the archive and the emergent inter-archive.Here questions of storage and access are important, which points to thesecond major process we identified in the New Encyclopaedia Project: digitalization.

Digitalization restructures the ways in which material is stored andaccessed in the archive. Many traditional academic archives still restrictaccess, even though digitalization potentially increases speed, scope andease of accessibility of digitalized material. With the development of theInternet there has been the formation and expansion of a massive parallelunstable shifting archive which increasingly backs up teaching andresearch. The Internet is rapidly changing the nature of academic activityand is becoming the key interface in a new scholarly apparatus which isreconstituting the normal way of working, communicating, searching,researching and accessing. Knowledge becomes information. The Internet,then, forms an unstable digital field, a potential space between the archiveand the encyclopaedia, which we have termed the encyclomedia. In effect,the digital media become both a topic and resource, something researchersneed to study and theorize to make sense of the world, but also the resource,the interface which cuts into and opens up that world (see Featherstone andVenn, 2006: 15).

In addition to the need to develop new forms of creative researchpractice, there is the need to learn how to handle and navigate the expand-ing public and private digital storage systems, in which institutions, organiz-ations and ordinary people collect, record, classify and edit material indigital format. This happens not only via the office or home terminal, butincreasingly on the move through integrated media such as personal organ-izers, netbooks, mobile phones, iPods, etc. More and more people arewatching Internet pod-casts, video clips and pop-ups and listening to musicfrom their cell phones and other mobile devices. This greater capacity forswitching modes, enhanced flexibility and integration means that media arenot just more mobile and work outside the office and home: the new mediaare also more interactive as cheaper multi-functional devices enable greaterpossibilities for creating, recording, editing, storing and archiving mediacontent (tv programmes, movies, music, images, textual data).

It is in this sense that people speak of ubiquitous media. We havemoved within a generation from the terminology of mass media, or themedia, with debates about the monopolistic concentration of media powerand dangers of pervasive manipulation (the culture industry, theconsciousness industry, the hidden persuaders), to the sense that mediaare now differentiated, dispersed and multi-modal. It is no longer adequate,then, to consider the media as referring to television, radio, magazines andnewspapers. The media can no longer be considered to be a monolithicstructure producing uniform media effects. Terms such as new media and

2 Theory, Culture & Society 26(23)



multi-media seek to grasp this move towards greater mobility, flexibilityand interactivity. At the same time they fail to adequately capture the prolif-eration of media forms, the new modes and media of dispersal, linking andintegration. Increasingly, as media become ubiquitous they becomeembedded in material objects and environments, bodies and clothing, zonesof transmission and reception. Media pervade our bodies, cultures andsocieties a shift made possible by miniaturized electronic circuitry, thecheap ubiquitous computer chips embedded in environments and mobiledevices that sustain a new communicative infrastructure. Cheaper multi-functional mobile devices are available which enable direct communication(voice, text, email) but also offer greater possibilities for downloading mediacontent and capturing, recording and transmitting images and sound as wemove through different worlds. At the same time as people are multi-tasking, attending to their miniature screens while on the move, they alsoare themselves being watched, checked out and recorded by CCTV cameras,computer spyware, biometrics, credit data checking, etc. The new ubiqui-tous media offer greater possibilities for surveillance and recording bythe state and other agencies, not just benign and friendly wireless environments.

The intensity of these changes represents a challenge to theorists whoseek to understand the emergent conditions for the generation and trans-mission of knowledge and its relation to the proliferation of digitalized infor-mation and new modes of everyday communication. Theorizing ubiquitousmedia becomes an integral part of theorizing culture and society today. Yetthe question of media has hardly been a central topic for previous gener-ations of social and cultural theorists. In this context Friedrich Kittlerswritings can be seen as important (see also Theory, Culture & Society[23(78)] on Kittler, edited by Winthrop-Young and Gane, 2006). In hiscontribution to this special issue, Towards an Ontology of Media, hesuggests that philosophy from the beginning has been unable to conceive ofmedia as media, the problem being that ontology deals with things, theirmatter and form, and not with the relation of things in time and space (theirmedium). Yet he goes on to show that Aristotle was the first to turn thecommon Greek proposition metax (between) into a philosophical concept:t metax (the medium). It has often been remarked that philosophers andthinkers tend to forget the medium of their thought, but Kittler argues thereis a strong connection between the making of books and the making ofontologies. This is evident in the move from reading scrolls to books inancient Rome, with Saint Augustine and Christian writers shifting readingpractices by comparing different conflicting sourcebook traditions. Thechange in media technology from scroll to book provided a different storagemedium for written material with a greater ease of access flicking throughbooks as opposed to laborious unwinding of scrolls which facilitated amore precise critical analysis of a wide range of texts. Kittler argues thatphilosophy consistently neglected its own technological media from theancient scroll to the modern bestseller book.

Featherstone Introduction 3



Bernard Stiegler in his contribution, Teleologics of the Snail: TheErrant Self Wired to a WiMax Network, argues that the new era of ubiqui-tous digital connectivity raises the question of what being can mean inthese new circumstances, the question of onto-teleology. It points to the needto radically rethink teleology and open up the question of new forms of tele-ologies and teleologics. Stiegler argues that todays mass media oriented toa capitalist consumer culture have altered the perception of ends or telos,and thus the economy of desire underlying any system of care. His startingpoint is that individuation and the constitution of singularities is bound upwith the dynamics linking technical, symbolic and psychical associatedmilieus, that is, milieus composed of elements whose state and activity aredynamically interrelated. This change relates to the new configuration oftechnical, symbolic and psychical associated milieus that forecloses thepossibility of alternative orientations to the future. In particular, he arguesthat hyperindustrial symbolic milieus, by undermining dialogical exchangebetween addressor and addressee, short-circuit dialogue and the possibilityof collective individuation through participation with others in the trans-formation of the social world. Furthermore, digital communication technolo-gies such as portable computers and other teletechnological digital devicesare producing symbolic milieus of a new kind, namely those characterizedby hypertextualization and hypermediatization. These new milieu institutea new ordering of our sense of the lived past and restructure memory. Theireffectiveness as new technical and psychic milieus means that, as on theInternet, we unknowingly and unavoidably leave traces which lead to theobjectification and potential exploitation of individuals. This suggests weneed to rethink care in the digital age. There is the need to explore thepotential of ubiquitous digital media to be harnessed for new teleologicalbecomings which would further a politics prioritizing the Iother relation,or philia.

Digital new media not only provide the potential for ubiquitousconnectivity and greater interactivity, enabling everyone to communicatewith everyone else; they also open up a further stage, that of a physicalenvironment of things talking to each other. In her contribution to thiscollection, RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-IntensiveEnvironments, N. Katherine Hayles analyses this emergent internet ofthings in which RFIDs (radio-frequency identification devices) are creatingan animate environment with agential and communicative powers. Thebinary divide between active, communicative humans and passive, silent,fixed objects no longer works, as objects are provided with ID tag computerchips and a transmitter/receiver. This allows them to sense their environ-ment and exchange information with other devices which form a complexinterrelated system along with its related databases. For Hayles, RFIDsopen up a new ontological dimension which challenges our conventionalideas about information. The RFIDs are becoming ubiquitous easy toproduce and cheap to sell, with the cheapest passive ones, as small as agrain of rice, costing only pennies. The simple ones have a computer chip




which supplies a 10-digit identification number, antenna and power sourceto backscatter a signal sent from a reader. More complex active ones cansend as well as receive radio waves for up to a mile. RFID tags are revolu-tionizing the way products are moved around, accessed and stored, withWal-Mart and the US Department of Defense already requiring suppliers toattach tags to their products. Tags can also be embedded in objects such ascars, clothes, wallets, shoes and of course passports, which enable peopleto be tracked as they move through environments which have RFIDreceivers. Increasingly, we face a world where the things on our person, nearto the body or means of transport, will be communicating with the networkof embedded chips in the environment, allegedly for our benefit forexample the museum or restaurant we pass which supplies information toour mobile devices as we walk past. This creates an environment wherethings around us are constantly offering, passing and collecting information.The collectors include governments, the military, corporations and otherbodies interested in harvesting our traces information about our move-ments, consumption habits and taste preferences which are uploadedinto relational databases which allow for correlations and data-mining techniques.

Hayles argues that the ontological and epistemological implications ofthe extension of these processes are important. If we understand humanconsciousness as emergent from lower-level distributed cognitive processes,then human cognitive and sub-cognitive processes can be connected todistributed mechanical cognition. RFIDs have the capacity to interface withhuman cognition well below the threshold of consciousness, via embodiedactions such as gesture, posture, etc., which give rise to and embody uncon-scious presuppositions what has been referred to as the technologicalunconscious (Clough, 2000; Thrift, 2005). If meaning and interpretationoccur across and between human and mechanical processes, then thecontexts for human actions are information-intensive environments whichinclude context-aware technologies such as RFIDs and their relational data-bases suggesting for Hayles the need for an expanded sense of ethics lessconcerned with generalization but more sensitive to context, processes andembodied distributed cognition. The politics of this emergent world, theincreased surveillance in an extensive society of control and the potentialfor counter-technologies are important questions.

In his contribution to the collection Kiyoshi Abe addresses thisquestion of increased surveillance in the Japanese context. For Abe, the newmedia have too frequently been addressed in terms of what he refers to asthe myth of media interactivity. Successively, we have had new media inthe 1980s, multimedia in the 1990s and ubiquitous media in the 2000sproclaimed as heralding more open interactive communication. Yet thepublic is largely unaware of the way in which information can be traced andstored at each stage of the communicative process. Abe is arguing for the co-existence of the surveillance society alongside the optimism surroundingubiquitous new media. Indeed, he goes on to emphasize that in the Japanese




context the assumptions of cultural homogeneity and communality are oftenregarded as preconditions for communication a view which is strengthenedby the actions of conservative governments which have been resistant toopening up Japan to outsiders. Control of information flows and surveillanceare therefore strongly evident in interactive media sites such as mixi, whereparticipants obsessed about the security of their interactions with strangersare eager to accept regulation and have little time for hospitality.

In recent decades a relatively benign image of high-tech Japan hasbeen developed and globalized. The notion of cool Japan (using the descrip-tor cool to echo the Cool Britannia rhetoric of the early years of the BlairGovernment in the UK) became associated with Japanese consumer andleisure goods largely targeted at youth. The term J-cool, as Anne Allisonremarks in her contribution to this collection, The Cool Brand, AffectiveActivism and Japanese Youth, has been used to refer to everything fromJapanese video-games and soft toys to the latest fads and fashions. She arguesthat it emerges with the move in Japan towards a more flexible economybased more upon services than manufacturing. This has been accompaniedby a shift from material things to the immateriality of information, communi-cation and affect. Following Hardt and Negri (2000), Lazzarato (2007) andothers, Allison uses the concept of immaterial labour to point to the moveinto an epoch which Hardt and Negri refer to as informationalization, wheremore and more workers produce immaterial goods such as services, culturalproducts, knowledge and communication. Of special interest is the sub-category of affective labour that Allison argues is central to understandingthe current situation of youth which, given their flexible attitude towardstechnology, play and communicative goods, occupies a special position inthis transition.3 They are among the groups most vulnerable to economicrestructuring and precarious work, the new forms of insecure, contingent,flexible work which range from illegal, casual and temporary work to home-working, piecework and freelancing. Pre carity, as Gill and Pratt (2008)argue in the special section in the Theory, Culture & Society Annual Reviewon Precarity and Cultural Work, is double-edged, with a second aspect thatshould not only be seen as oppressive but as positive, opening up the poten-tial for new types of subjectivities, socialities and politics.

Allison examines this duality in the Japanese context in which youthsuffer the insecurities of affective labour, which see new forms of socialityand social types develop: the freeta, youth employed in non-permanent jobssuch as convenience stores; the parasito shinguru (parasite singles), thosewho stay at home living with parents; the hikikomori, the socially withdrawn;the NEET, the youth who dont attend school or work. But there is also affective activism, entailing new forms of care: the freeta unions, which insome cases reach out to the NEET and even hikikomori with campaigns forbetter jobs, work conditions and security for youth; the kowaremono (brokenpeople) performances with their events and support groups. Affect is alsodesigned into the new media forms and material goods, which cross over andmutate within consumer culture Pokmon being seen as a key example of




this new form of affective brandgoods, and the globalization of Japanese softpower. Allison sees this as part of a new form of fuzzy consumerism or softcapitalism, where the player-consumer is asked to be an active producercreating webs of attachment by developing interactive role-play networks,involving the consumption not of things but the construction of worlds whichcan be inhabited along with real and virtual friends and associates.

This capacity of media goods to move across different media modali-ties and immaterial and material forms is also taken up by Marc Steinbergin his paper in this collection, Anytime, Anywhere: Tetsuwan AtomuStickers and the Emergence of Character Merchandizing. Steinberg focuseson character merchandizing which has become a major element in thecontents industry. Like Anne Allison, he notes the shift in Japanesegovernment policy in the last decade towards cognitive capitalism, withthe focus on the provision of media content buttressed by intellectualproperty rights. Steinberg argues that character merchandizing can be seenas a major factor in what has become known as the media mix, a termwidely used in Japan to describe the creation of a series of connectionsbetween and across media texts: a manga or comic serialization will beturned into an anime series, then a live action film, a video game and anovel. At the same time in Japan the media-mix is not particularly new,given the longstanding strength of the anime-manga nexus. Steinberg tellsus that a major turning point occurred when the popular manga characterTetsuwan Atomu [literally iron arm or strong atom, marketed in the US asAstro Boy] became transformed into a highly successful anime televisionseries in the early 1960s. The TV shows sponsor Meiji Seika, the largestchocolate manufacturer in Japan, decided to use the Atomu character for asticker campaign. The sticker drawing of Atomu had a close graphic matchto the manga and anime depictions and high potential mobility they couldbe stuck anywhere on school bags, desks, refrigerators, books, clothes, etc.The stickers were notable in their transportability and capacity to act asdevices to help the child evoke and re-imagine the atom boy world,anywhere, anytime.

They facilitated a new type of sociality based upon thing communi-cation (mono-komi as opposed to masu-komi [mass communication]) andparticipation in communities of consumption. This leads to not just aubiquity within media (Atomu is everywhere on television) but a ubiquitousmedia in which media images and texts are found everywhere in multiplemedia formats (manga, anime, television, stickers, toys, etc). FollowingLazzarato, Steinberg emphasizes that capitalism should not be seen as amode of production but a production of modes, or fashions, and consump-tion entails not buying or destroying a product but belonging to a world.For Steinberg, this suggests the need to rethink the postmodern emphasisupon the consumption of immaterial signs (Baudrillards sign value with itsemphasis on relational differences), as this neglects the consideration of thematerial products and the patterns of usage which support these signs afamiliar argument for Theory, Culture & Society readers given a new twist.




Some of these arguments are also taken up by Ian Condry in his contribution to this issue on Anime Creativity. Condry wants to focus onwhat he refers to as collaborative creativity, the various dimensions ofcollaboration amongst animators and media industries, between producersand consumers and globally across national boundaries. The Japanesegovernment has been promoting a shift towards cultural industries over thelast decade and has become aware that, despite the rhetoric of producing anation founded on intellectual property, capitalizing on creativity and mediadynamism is a more important long-term source of value than the immedi-ate economic success of culture industries. This insight is used to suggestthat Japan needs to foster the visibility and desire to produce culturalcontent; hence the development of character as a fluid, relational objectbecomes highly valued. This leads Condry to examine a number of casestudies (including Dekoboko Friends, Zenmai Zamurai and others) to arguethat it is the character, rather than the storyline, which is seen as provid-ing the potential for merchandizing and other forms of value realization.

In some ways the construction of characters in anime acts like brands,with the latter having been referred to as the institutional embodiment of anew form of informational capitalism given their ability to exploit thecapacity of consumers to produce a common social world through communi-cation and interaction (Arvidsson, 2006). Yet brands tend to refer back totheir corporate origins, whereas characters tend to emerge from particularpremises and world-settings which dont necessarily centre on the story-line, for often characters inhabit a space where the story, the narrative coher-ence, is left open. Rather than focusing attention on culture in theunchanging normative sense culture as a thing Condry, followingMichael M.J. Fischer (2007; cf Spivak, 2006), prefers to see culture asemergent out of mutations and assemblages. New information technologiesand media environments can be regarded as culturing new connectivities,with culture here being seen in the biological sense of culturing tissue orgrowing new immortal cell lines to write with biology. It is in this sensethat Condrys use of the term collaborative creativity is fleshed out. Charac-ters matter because they offer greater value realization and connectivity the market for licensed merchandizing based on fictional characters is tentimes more than that of anime itself. What anime produces is not so muchfilms and television series but, more importantly, fictional characters thatcan be played out across diverse media and consumer modalities. Using anethnographic approach to the making of Japanese animation, Condry triesto show that anime creators design new products not in terms of the storiesthey tell, but rather in terms of the distinctiveness of their characters,premises and world-settings; this suggests that popular anime series arisebecause of the designed-in flexibility of being able to move characters andpremises across a wide range of media platforms.

Further aspects of the Japanese contents industries and new media areaddressed in the contributions to this collection by Hyeshin Kim, DominicPettman and Sunil Manghani. Kims investigation of electronic games for




women, Womens Games in Japan: Gendered Identity and NarrativeConstruction, confirms a similar pattern of mixing and multiple media,working across anime, manga and other forms, to that found by Steinbergand Condry. Examining long-standing games such as Angelique, the firstwomans game developed for the Super Nintendo in 1994 by an all-femaleteam at Koei, Kim tells us that it was a dating-simulation game, heavilyinfluenced by the long-standing Japanese girls comics (shoujo manga)format, which was integrated into the familiar mixed-media cross-overs withfan-books, and cosplay (costume play dressing up as anime, manga orgame characters). The main concept of the Angelique game was to competewith a mean rich girl surrounded by cool guys, a recurrent theme in shoujomanga with its prevalent emphasis upon love, romance and relationships,as the player strives to raise the affection meter through repeated conver-sation and dating. A more recent popular game, Haruka, created in 2000,has seen a transition from the conventional more passive soft feminineheroines of the original version to the sword-brandishing warrior heroine ofHaruka3 (2004), which is set in the Genpei War of 12th-century Japan. Yetthis manifest wilfulness in the central character Nozomi is still blended withfamiliar traditional feminine shoujo manga qualities; she is both the iden-tifiable subject and desirable object: a character which retains a key aspectof female avatars, a femininity which is neither downplayed nor overtly sexu-alized.

In his contribution, Love in the Time of Tamagotchi, DominicPettman continues the discussion of Japanese libidinal relationships andnew media technologies by focusing on dating simulation games. Manypeople will have heard about Japanese young peoples fascination withTamagotchi, which enjoyed its first boom in 1997. A Tamagotchi (literallyegg-watch) was a small disc-shaped pocket device with a screen providinga digital animated pet simulation; the pet needs regular feeding, walking,training and caring if neglected, it becomes bad tempered and eventuallydies. The dating sims are a further development also involving routinizedcare for a partner with a series of rewards and penalties for the user whomust learn to win the heart of the beloved through diligence, attentivenessand inventiveness. The dating simulations have spawned hundreds of cross-platform and merchandizing spin-offs with numerous online versions(winning a lover or nurturing a virtual roommate rather than a virtual pet).This suggests the migration of types of affective intimacy previously seenas analogue into digital new media forms. Pettman argues we will increas-ingly find that the question of whether the information through which weengage with our interactant is constituted by the image of an actual personor the avatar of a virtual character, will become a redundant ethical questionas we become more familiar with digital life. Romanticism has alreadyprepared us to fall is love with composite indescribabilities (Travers, 1999:333) of various kinds in the genealogy that can be traced back from WilliamGibson to Mary Shelley and beyond. As Pettman points out, there areexpanding debates in both academic and public life as to the balance sheet




for human beings who increasingly interact with screen simulations andavatars, to the extent that the lines between virtual agents and real friendsbecome blurred. This echoes the debates about the rise of the Facebook andMySpace Friends generation and concern about the alleged damage tohuman psychology and biology that the loss of everyday face-to-face socialrelationships poses. Yet these debates should not obscure the fact thatcourtship at a distance, using various mediating technologies, has long beenwith us.

This argument is also addressed by Sunil Manghani in his contributionto this collection, Love Messaging: Mobile Phone Txting Seen Through theLens of Tanka Poetry, in which he explores the linkages between mobilephone text messaging and long-standing Japanese tanka poetry. Manghanisuggests that both tanka poetry (originating in 8th-century Japan, with tankacompetitions still held today in popular newspapers) and txt (the SMS[short message service] abbreviated text messages sent via mobile phonesand other devices) require a similar discipline of composing short texts tobe exchanged with an intimate other. Short texts can only be up to 160characters long; a tanka poem is comprised of 31 characters, usually writtenin a regular 57577 structure. Rather than conceiving of mobile phonetexting as a purely functional code devoid of affect, aesthetics and poetics,Manghani argues that messaging can be used to keep alive the ongoingbackground awareness of others, to retain ones part in a full-time intimatecommunity. It is interesting to note that those who use mobile Internetfrequently also spend more time in physical contact with friends. The inter-face-to-interface contact does not need to replace the face-to-face as manycommentators fear; both forms have the capacity to sustain intimacy. Insome ways they can both be seen as devices to heighten romantic communi-cation to enhance communication by largely doing without communi-cation (Luhmann, 1986: 25). The tanka poem and mobile text message bothoffer not only expression but the discipline of the short form, a sort of mini-malist kind of love based on indirect communication. At the same time,texting is clearly much more immediately interactive than sending loveletters. Yet common to both forms is the potential for a form of collabora-tive writing, a continuous chain of exchanges built into a sequence. In thecase of texting there is also the added problem of storage and archivingmessages: given the lack of standard memory on phones, painful forceddeletions are necessary (which, Manghani argues, could be seen as akin totearing up a photograph of a loved one). Yet this impermanence and lack oftransferability between different media and archiving potential could wellbe on the way to being solved.

New technologies become adapted and integrated into the human bodyand the body itself changes with technologies. The move from writing witha brush to writing with a pen, to keying in words on a typewriter, personalcomputer and mobile phone means significant shifts in the musculature andcontrol of the hand and hand-brain coordination. Young people becomeincreasingly familiar with and skilled at texting one-handed with a mobile




phone, using the thumb as the interface. For them, the thumb enjoys a morecentral role and replaces the index finger in some functions such as pressingthe doorbell button. It would seem that corporations and governments haveprimarily considered mobile phone texting as a communicative device, andthe nature of the text provided on the screen and layout of the keyboard aresubsumed under the quest for speed of keying and readability with ergonom-ics the main consideration. The potential benefits of mobile phone texting,the effects of the scripts and codes used for training the mind or body, wouldbe seen as bizarre.

Yet, as Raja Adal suggests in his contribution to this collection,Japans Bifurcated Modernity: Writing and Calligraphy in Japanese PublicSchools, 18721943, the attitude in Japan towards teaching children howto write, or penmanship, has shifted many times from the 1870s to thepresent day. The Meiji reformers of the 1870s, who instituted a programmeof rapid modernization, favoured a penmanship which fitted in with thedemands of modern industrial society for functionality, speed and clarityand thus favoured the pen over the brush. Yet as Japan became modern,modernity itself became the object of critique, and calligraphy, writing practices emphasizing aesthetics, art and ritual, were viewed favourably.Especially in the 1930s and 1940s, penmanship became associated again(as in pre-Meiji Japan) with perfection of character and was referred to asshod (the way [d] of doing writing [sho]). The secondary school curricu-lum of 1943 introduced two new subjects which ended with d (path or way):shod (the way of writing) and bud (the martial way). The two forms becamejoined together as bunbu (the literary and martial skills), a return to the coreof the education of samurai children. Yet in the postwar era penmanship,unlike the martial arts, retained its utility. In the Japanese context, althoughthe wabun typewriter had been invented in 1913, it never became wide-spread due to the difficulties of incorporating the thousands of Kanji(sinogram) characters of the Japanese language. Typings impracticality thusfavoured the superior functionality of penmanship until the appearance ofthe word-processor and computer at the end of the 20th century. Yet boththe typewriter, the quintessential functional machine, and art, an 18th-century reaction to the coming of machine civilization, were effectivelymodern. The nature and genealogy of the Japanese and sinogram writinginscription systems has not only favoured their double life, that of the penand the brush, functional and aesthetic, design and digital print, but hasbeen a singular resource for the construction and reconstruction of tradition.

Hwa Yol Jung takes the discussion of sinograms and sinography furtherin his contribution to this issue: Ernest Fenollosas Etymosinology in theAge of Global Communication. He argues that sinography, in its calli-graphic form in particular, is kinetic and is the human body in motion. Ofparticular interest is his discussion of Marshall McLuhans fascination withthe audio-tactile morphology of the Chinese ideogram or sinogram, whichhe had earlier encountered via the etymosinology of Ernest Fenollosa. ForMcLuhan, the Chinese sinogram unleashed bodily energies, arousing the




audio-tactile senses as opposed to sight. Hwa Yol Jung remarks thatMcLuhans The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) is an anti-visualist and anti- typographic treatise in its embrace of the poetics of electronic media.McLuhan saw this as a step beyond Eurocentric ocularism, which had itsorigins in the invention of the alphabet in ancient Greece and became inten-sified with the dominance of print technology in the post-Gutenberg era. ForMcLuhan, electronic technologys global extension not only challenged anddeconstructed the hegemony of vision but also released the synaestheticinterplay of all the senses. In a similar way to electricity, sinograms forMcLuhan are seen as arousing the sense of touch, which can be seen asinitiating the synthesis of the senses. McLuhan, then, is attracted by thesensory synaesthesia of sinograms as the preferred medium of communi-cation; sinographic writing is anti-anaesthetic and tactile, avoiding ocular-centric fragmentation. In his posthumous work Laws of Media (1988),McLuhan discusses Capeks Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics(1961) and Capras The Tao of Physics (1975) as relevant to his attempts todevelop a new science of media and to establish the dynamic nature of thephysical world in terms of auditory models or polyphony, as opposed topictorial or visual ones. He saw Capras work as capable of opening up adialogue between McLuhans own (Western) new science of media and theEast. For McLuhan the non-alphabetic (sinographic) East emphasizes theacoustic, simultaneity and synaesthesia, whereas the West emphasizes thevisual, the linear and the sequential, together forming the basis for a newsynchronicity, or in Gadamers phraseology the fusion of horizons, which isthe platform for the development of another future, the future of planetarythinking.

These reflections from the later McLuhan are made with broad brush-strokes and could be seen as generating an overtly-forced EastWestdichotomy for example, where Hwa Yol Jung presents him as working ona model of the brains right hemisphere as sinographic and acoustic (theEast) versus the left hemisphere as alphabetic and visual (the West). In hercontribution to the collection, Thoughts Not Our Own: Whatever Happenedto Selective Attention?, Barbara Stafford comments that while it is commonthat language-related processes have been seen as belonging to the lefthemisphere and the more holistic spatial and perceptual functions regardedas assigned to the right hemisphere, research on brain lesions challengesthis neat division of labour as a cognitive illusion. In actuality, both the leftand the right hemispheres work together to create a single individual. ForStafford too vision cannot work in the ocularcentric, disembodied and monological way Jung attributes to Cartesianism and much of Westernscience. Jung approaches the question from a perspective influenced byMerleau-Ponty with the emphasis on the lived body (corps vcu), the bodyas a means or organization, as the field in which perceptions become local-ized. Stafford also examines the structural and phenomeno logical aspects ofvision, but focuses more centrally on the revolutionary findings of themodern neurobiological sciences, which have also challenged the powerful




epistemological models of Western science and philosophy. She is aware ofthe centrality of movement to vision and aesthetic experience (kinaesthet-ics), the importance of change in perspectives and sudden shifts in aspect,which has recently been confirmed by neuroscientific studies that empha-size the plasticity of the human brain. Yet neuroscience also emphasizes thebrain-mind as a self-organizing system and the decentralized brain in thebody, in which an estimated 90 percent of brain activity is performed largelyunconsciously and autonomously following pre- determined instructions,relatively closed off from environmental sensory inputs.

Stafford is calling for visual studies to become incorporated into a moregeneral phenomenology of the senses, based on the understanding of howrapid neural reconfigurations influence the highly flexible behaviouraldynamics of our everyday lives. Escaping our autopoietic brain regulativesystem and focusing carefully on the world is the challenge to be faced.Stafford argues that art is a willed perception imaginatively and publiclyworking on the world. But she feels that these conscious operations aremade more difficult by the proliferation of autopoietic devices and the newmedia. The decision about what should be suppressed is taken for us bysolipsistic cellphones, environment-screening Bose headsets, mobilemicrosized PDAs or removable MP3 players and VR gaming systems. Shesees the problem with these mobile devices and portable immersive tech-nologies in the way they screen out what supposedly does not matter; yeteducating the remaining 10 percent of the brain, she suggests, is aboutshowing students the benefits of volition and effort, so that by changing theway they think about their thoughts they can change their brains and theworld.

The new ubiquitous media, then, invite a range of responses. KatherineHayles shows this ambivalence in her discussion of RFIDs which can beseen as a new form of surveillance and monitoring by governments andcorporations, but also can be useful for ordinary people in negotiatingcomplex environments and locating particular goods, services and storeditems. Likewise Maurizio Lazzaratto (2007; see also Toscano, 2007) hasargued that the new technologies, especially video with its capacity fordelaying and accelerating, has the ability to show pre-individual affect andpermit access to a new aesthetic dimension, opening up a new way of seeingthe world. This is also reinforced by Mark Hansen in his analysis of video-art, in particular his discussion of Bill Violas Anima (2000). Hansen arguesthat the way in which Violas artwork takes one minute of differentexpressions of emotion on the human face, and slows them down to over onehour of playback time, enables the rich texture of affective information inemotional transitions to become visible (Hansen, 2004b; see discussion inFeatherstone, 2009).

In his contribution to this collection, Living (with) Technical Time:From Media Surrogacy to Distributed Cognition, Mark Hansen continueshis analysis of recent work in media art to investigate how time has changedin the wake of digital new media. Hansen initially focuses on the German




artist Wolfgang Staehles work Empire 24/7, which involves a webcam livevideo-feed of images of the Empire State Building, an attempt to updateAndy Warhols famous eight-hour movie Empire, which records the durationof a day of the Empire State Building. Staehles piece, Hansen argues, worksin an entirely different aesthetic register, having an open-ended indetermi-nate finitude. Empire 24/7 poses the question of whether the cinematictemporal object (even one as of extensive duration as Warhols Empire) canstill claim to mediate temporal experience in the contemporary world ofdigital computing. Indeed, as Hansen remarks, this raises the question ofwhether contemporary technical mediations of time are beyond aesthetics,because they operate at a level that bypasses circuits linking technics andhuman beings; that is, those circuits that we currently conceptualize underthe name of media. Works like Staehles institute a different technicalregime which goes beyond the Husserlian definition of the temporal object,in that they are not a surrogate for the flux of consciousness. Empire 24/7inscribes times flux independently of any synthesis of consciousness andtherefore prior to the differentiation of lived and artifactual time. In this,Hansen argues, it creates a technical temporal quasi-object which he callsa diachronic thing. The new media technology supports what Hansen callsprimary presencing, a form of temporal continuity that is a precursor to allforms of temporal experience, to aesthetics and the media; it can do thisbecause the technics is fully integral to the happening.

To understand the impact of the spread of the new media today,Hansen argues, we therefore need to focus on the shift in the artifactualiza-tion of time from cinema media objects to more fine-scaled digital inscrip-tions. Following Husserl, Stiegler has argued that cinema is the exemplarytemporal object for reflecting on time-consciousness. It provides the generaltechnical support for our experience of time and, consequently, humanconsciousness can be seen as having an essentially cinematographic struc-ture (Stiegler, 1998: 68). Furthermore, consciousness operates through aprocess of selection not only essentially similar to the process of cinematicediting, but Stiegler goes further to argue that in todays world contempor-ary culture industries offer us standardized collective secondary memoriesthat form the basis for the selection of new presents and for the projectionof the future. In effect, for Stiegler (2003: 154) todays culture industrieshave control not only over content but the very mechanisms of our tempor-alization. For Hansen this paints a too grim neo-Frankfurt School picture,and against this he suggests that digital technologies inscribe time in a rangeof ways which are far more open and flexible; they do not bind time in arestrictive form, nor subordinate it to the ends of any common experience.

Film as a medium is also addressed by Shigehiko Hasumi in his contri-bution to this collection: Fiction and the Unrepresentable: All Movies arebut Variants on the Silent Film. Hasumi is interested in why it is the casethat in over 100 years of film, the medium has not yet truly incorporatedsound; in effect the so-called talkie can be regarded as only a variant ofthe silent film. The camera and the sound recorder developed as two entirely




separate technologies with no consideration as to how the image and soundmight be synchronized. It is accepted by viewers as entirely normal thatsound has been added after the event to movies in post-production. Incontrast to the long history of amateur movie-making which can be tracedback to the outbreak of the First World War, the technology of sound record-ing remained the exclusive preserve of specialist technicians for muchlonger. Sound engineers successfully defended their monopoly from theencroachment of amateurs until the popularity of the tape recorder in the1960s. Video cameras containing digital magnetic tape made it possible torecord sound and image synchronously on the same medium. This enabledthe real voices of actors to be recorded without suspended or boom micro-phones and for the first time freed the production of films from conflictsbetween lighting and sound engineers.

It is only with the digital age of the 21st century that we are begin-ning to see the real integration of image and sound reproduction. The popu-larity of the digital video camera is a key moment in the process, yet itremains to be seen how long it takes for film to break free from the longdominant paradigm of the silent film, given that most directors have beensteeped in the history of the cinema and are in many ways film fundamen-talists. Certainly, Hasumi says, our perception of the history of the 20thcentury would have been different if synchronous sound and film recordingof events had taken place. Our own lives in general are bound up with manyevents presented in the silent movie dominant paradigm, with aural repre-sentation generally excluded from consideration; hence it remains to be seenwhether the 21st century will be anything other than a variant of the 20thcentury. Hasumi argues that the taboo against reproducing the voice couldbe nothing other than a reflection of the supremacy still granted to the voicein the structure of human knowledge. Unlike images, which were themselvesalready reproductions, the voice was identified with the body itself. Thissuggests for Hasumi that reproducing the voice implied a loss of corporal-ity, and it was for this reason more than any other that amateurs were barredfrom access to sound reproduction technology for so long.

If film is only now starting to explore the potential of simultaneousvisual and sound recording, the potential to add on other sensory inputs formany would seem to still be in the realm of science fiction. Yet DaveBoothroyd in his contribution to this collection, Touch, Time and Technics:Levinas and the Ethics of Haptic Communications, takes up the challengeto theorize the potential of touch and argues that the development of interactive haptic media can help us to rethink the nature of communication.He emphasizes communications essential embodied, sensory and tactilecapacities, which provide an opportunity to rethink the ethical dimensionof sensuality and develop an ethics of contact or touch. Boothroyd arguesthat theorizations of media-related virtuality (cyberspace) have generallyremained preoccupied with questions of representation, which has helpedperpetuate the ocularcentric paradigm. The haptic, the sense of touch, hesees as central to personal or intimate relationships: when one shares the




same physical space with another it provides the potential for touch(stroking, caressing, hand-holding, massage, kissing, palpating, patting,etc.). Haptic media technologies are still only starting to be developed, butBoothroyd anticipates the time when the richness and plenitude of sensationthrough haptic tele-contact may be as evident and familiar as tele-vision isfor us today. At the same time he emphasizes that this should not be seenas merely a reconstruction of an originary pre-existing sensible reality, foreach new media technology introduces what McLuhan called the totalmedia environment, a transformation of reality through a process of tech-nical incorporation which produces new ways of being in the world, newexperiences and forms of social relationships.

Boothroyd discusses the work of Mark Hansen (2004a, 2006a, 2006b),who argues that the human body and digital information need to be thought ofas a conjunction. Focusing on the visual arts, Hansen suggests that the visualshould be thought in terms of haptic processes involving the modification ofthe physical body. Indeed Hansen invites us to think of all the senses in termsof the haptic: the human body is seen as proactively and proprioceptivelyreflexive. An affective body doesnt wait for the judgement of consciousnessbut, following Bergson, can be seen as a centre of indeterminate affectiveprocesses; an affective body is not passively acted on, as there is no essen-tial fixed distinction between internal and external, but is rather includedwithin the information processing ensemble. Boothroyd wishes, then, toexamine the ways in which haptological thinking raises the issue of theconnectivity of the body to its total environment, with the latter seen as animmersive total media environment progressively transformed by each newmedium (writing, print, radio, TV, digital, etc.) in the way McLuhan outlined.

Boothroyd goes on to discuss the writings of Derrida (2005) andLevinas (1981) to develop his critique of Hansen. Derrida emphasizes theinseparability or necessary interfacing of the human toucher with themanipulation of the touched material environment. He argues that a certainhaptocentrism has always been at work beneath the ocularcentrism ofWestern thinking and cautions that the dangers of a re-evaluation of hapticism could lead to a re-invention of haptocentrism. The emergence ofthe digital haptic media environment has developed in parallel with therethinking of the senses in terms of affect and has facilitated a rethinkingof the visual outside the paradigm of representation. In terms of affect theory,touch can be viewed as being fundamental to each of the other senses; yetBoothroyd, following Derrida, cautions against the dangers of thinking oftouch based in its supposed re-presentation, as in the haptic data sets wefind in the contemporary brain sciences, and remarks that Mark Hansenrelies on a positivist account of the haptic which tends towards the kind ofhaptocentrism Derrida warns against. For Derrida, touch precedes thedifferentiation or determination of the subject and the object and for thisreason is unrepresentable and ultimately unthematizable.

This suggests that a theory of touch must go through a theory of skin,for the skin is the site where the event of contact takes place. Touching




precedes my sense of my own being-in-a-skin and my subjectivity isproduced from the sense of a certain withdrawal of contact, the movementaway from an other. This relates to Levinass ethical theorization of the skin,an ethics of touch, in that he regards touch as the exposure to affectiveinvolvement with others. Touch should be seen as a form of contaminatedcommunication, not subjectobject communication. Yet, for Boothroyd, theskin should be regarded as an inter(sur)face and not seen as restricted toany technological form but as a reference to the materiality of the processof communication, which is the site of affective transmission and exchangeof movement. The thematization of haptic media, then, provides a newcultural context for rethinking this relationship.

In her contribution to this collection, Symbiotic Architecture: Prehend-ing Digitality, Luciana Parisi discusses the use of the genetic algorithm indigital architecture. Computer software has been used in architectural designsince the 1960s and, more recently, there have been debates about the useof cybernetic experiments that use self-organizing systems to design respon-sive media environments. The Sensity Project, for example, collects senso-rimotor data including changes in the weather, traffic noise, movement ofpeople and vibration of buildings to develop an emergent architecture ableto re-form the experience of the city in real time. This can be seen as partof a shift away from the fixed shapes of Euclidean geometry to an architec-ture of movement and variation. Movement and curvature become centralto this software-responsive architecture and represent a departure from LeCorbusiers finite lines, right angles and frozen surfaces. The concern withmovement can be traced back to the Italian Futurists and, more recently,there has been the metabolist movement in Japan in the late 1960s, withKisho Kurokawas design for the centre of Tokyo including a central nucleusand seven tentacular axes leading to peripheral paths of energy-informationexchange, with the capsule employed in a modular system as the minimumdwelling unit. Here we have the dynamics of continual growth and renewalby mechanical processes, but the modularity still meant pre-ordained partsthat could be broken apart and brought together again.

This contrasts with the interest since the 1990s in the development ofsymbiotic algorithms which has permitted architectural design to experi-ment with growth and breeding, to produce an evolutionary architecture ofmovement, interaction, iterative differentiation and continual curving. Anarchitectural design, based on the ways since the 1990s that the biologicaland informational have been joined together to produce autonomous evolutionary programmes which feedback into digital culture and indeedmore general cultural modelling, is now seen as composed of milieus ofviral ecologies. As Massumi (2005) argues, the new biogram digital archi-tecture can be seen to resonate with the proprioceptive and affective orien-tation of a body in space, with its capacities of variation and movementacross levels, shapes and forms. This form of symbiotic architecture seessolids not as static but as trajectories; it turns space into blobs, an aqueousextension and near solid. Unlike Dawkins model of biological evolution




based on a serial genetic algorithm, Parisi favours a model of evolutionbased upon parallel algorithms entering into symbiotic alliances triggeredby environmental variation. This parallelism produces not just the evolu-tion of one algorithm or the other, but a new algorithmic behaviour akin tothe self-organizing multiple agent systems such as one finds in ant coloniesor bee swarms. Here Parisi draws on the conception of symbiotic parasitismin which hosts and guests become accomplices in the production of intri-cate ecologies, drawing on Marguliss (1992) serial endosymbiotic theorydeveloped to understand the parasitic architectures of bacteria. The muta-tional nature of and continual variation of the assemblage is emphasized inwhich the environment is not seen as a static ground but as being continu-ally moved, which strongly suggests that the status of the object and subjectneed to be rethought in terms of vectors of a curve, not the line and pointof view of the ocularcentric tradition, which equates the point of view witha pregiven subject and object assigned a fixed position. Digital architectureand its increasing use in the design of contemporary media culture, then,should not be seen as an architecture of form; rather, it seeks to grasp thehaze of dust without object out of which form emerges and falls back(Deleuze, 1993: 94).

The new forms of digital architecture become used in digital softwaredesign which has a myriad of applications in ubiquitous media. In an age ofpluriform, out-of-control megacities, it may never result in the new plannedcity, based upon evolving architectures, but nevertheless can become appliedin a range of spatial and environmental contexts. It is exploring similar theor-etical terrain to some of the recent work on biotechnology, bioinformatics,bioart, biocapital and biopolitics and the affective turn (Clough, 2007, 2008;Cooper, 2006, 2008; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2009; Palladino, forth -coming; Rajan, 2006; Rose, 2001; Thrift, 2008). As mentioned in our earlierdiscussion of Fischer (2007) in which media environments can be seen asculturing new connectivities, there is a return to the biological sense ofculture, or rather culturing: growing cultures which produce new mutationsand assemblages. Not only is information alive, but information-saturatedcultures are also seen as alive (Brouwer and Mulder, 2003; Featherstoneand Venn, 2006; Mulder, 2006; Spivak, 2006), and we see the emergenceof a new set of metaphors for social and cultural life.

At the same time Parisis discussion is conducted at a high level ofabstraction, focusing on architectural design modelling, and is removedfrom any sense of the practices of people who move about the city, alongwith the shifting power-balances between architects, developers, business-men and politicians which result in the adoption of particular types of archi-tecture. From one perspective the city can be analysed as a self-governingprocess, one in which the rise of the media-architecture complex can beseen as giving rise to the media city (McQuire, 2008). Yet there is a dangerin thinking the media city purely in terms of visual media technologies likephotography, cinema and screen computer technologies. Rather, as Kittler(1996; see also Chikamori, 2009) argues, the city more fundamentally




should be regarded as a medium. The city buildings, the streets, the monu-ments, the cemeteries are also recording and storage devices and archivesof not just public information and memories but ones that embody alabyrinth of traces and involuntary memories which are not just summonedby the eye but by the full range of other sensory impressions. The city asmedium connects with the body as medium, the body as a recording andstorage device, the body as archive. Moving around the city demands atactile eye (Taussig, 1991) and the engagement of the synaesthesia of thesenses, suggesting, as Hwa Yol Jung cautions, the need to go beyond ocularcentric accounts of media. This certainly has been one of the lessonsof this set of papers produced from the Ubiquitous Media Conference, andwe look forward to future explorations of this theme in the pages of Theory,Culture & Society.

Notes

1. The Ubiquitous Media (UMAT) Conference was one of a series of TCS confer-ences which include: the 10th Anniversary Theory, Culture & Society conferenceheld in Pittsburgh in 1992 (selected papers published as Global Modernities, Feath-erstone, Lash and Robertson, 1995), and the second Theory, Culture & SocietyConference on Culture and Identity: City, Nation, World, held in Berlin in 1995(selected papers published as Spaces of Culture, Featherstone and Lash, 1999). Athird conference on Cosmopolis was held in Helsinki in 2000 with a selection ofpapers published as a TCS special issue (Featherstone, 2002).2. This issue would not have been possible without the valuable work of CouzeVenn, Neil Turnbull, Jun Tanaka and Roy Boyne, who read and commented on allthe papers submitted for the special issue in addition to our usual TCS referees.Simon Dawes, the TCS editorial assistant, has provided important work in helpingprepare the papers for publication. Couze Venn also made numerous helpful sugges-tions about ways to improve this introduction to the special issue. In terms of theorganizing and planning of the conference, we owe a major debt to Shunya Yoshimiand Hidetaka Ishida and their colleagues at the University of Tokyo. Important coordination work between the English and Japanese groups was provided byTomoko Tamari and Takuji Yamamoto. The design work for the conference websiteand wireless metaspace system was conducted by Takuya Abe and ShinichiHisamatsu. The media art stream and exhibition was organized by Tomoe Moriyama.The programme committee (Roy Boyne, Akihiro Kitada, Jun Tanaka, Neil Turnbulland Couze Venn) dealt with the numerous abstracts and paper submissions. Theimportant work of the many Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies andGraduate School of Arts and Sciences postgraduates should also be acknowledged,especially: Yutaka Iida, Rin Tsuboi, Kenji Nishi, Kazumichi Takahata, TakeshiNakaji, David Buist, Hiroko Ichikawa, Sungmin Kim, Kyoko Shibano, YoshiakiShuuto, Takahito Niikura, Mitsuhiro Hayashi, Fumiko Ito, Atsuko Watanabe, KawolChung, Ja-young Nam and Junko Aoki. Robert Rojek at Sage helped in countlessways. On the TCS side a number of editors, especially Ryan Bishop, Roy Boyne,Nick Gane, Scott Lash, John Phillips, Neil Turnbull, Bryan Turner and Couze Venn,helped with many aspects of the conference. Financial support was provided by:the Horiba International Conference Fund, the Japanese Society for the Promotionof Science International Meeting Series, the International Communications




Foundation, Japan Foundation, The 21st Century Center of ExcellenceProgram/Center for the Study of Ubiquitous Computing Infrastructure at theUniversity of Tokyo, and SAGE Publications Ltd.3. The term affective labour is often seen as too vague and imprecise and has manycritics. For a discussion see Gill and Pratt (2008).

References

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Mike Featherstone is Editor of Theory, Culture & Society. His recentpublications include Automobilities (edited with N. Thrift and J. Urry,SAGE, 2005; Japanese translation forthcoming from Hosei University Press)and Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 2nd edn (SAGE, 2007). TheJapanese translation of his book Undoing Culture has just been publishedas Hotsureyuku Bunka by Hosei University Press.




Ubiquitous Media, Featherstone

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