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Accepted Paper:

Why participatory media make "object" a four letter word  
Robert Glenn "Rob" Howard (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Paper short abstract:

One inheritance of digital technologies is that all digital communication is hybrid. Such communication cannot be imagined as a “text” or “lore” because these four letter words approach process as if it were an object and obscure the dynamic and changing nature of digital communication practices.

Paper long abstract:

In 1975, thirty-two computer hobbyists met in a garage in what would become California's Silicon Valley. This "HomeBrew Computer Club" imagined a future utopia of individually owned computers that would grant everyone access to the technologies that were, at that time, so expensive and technical only institutions could afford them. Club member Bill Gates developed "software" while other members, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, developed the "personal computer". In 1977, the U.S. military successfully sent "packets" of on-and-off power fluctuations between computers. Their project was born of a different vision. They wanted a distributed communication system that could survive the imagined nuclear battlefields of the Cold War. The computer code they used, TCP/IP, is still the basis of all digital networks today. Born of the unlikely coupling of these two very different ideologies, the handheld mobile devices that keep us continually networked together are the inheritance of both a vision of individual freedom and a vision of bomb-proof institutional power. With this dual ideology, participatory media become locations for the emergence of diverse, hybrid, and even conflicting aggregate volitions. Because of this diversity, the digital expression of such volitions cannot be imagined in static terms as "texts" or "lore" because these four letter words approach process as if it were an object and obscure the fundamentally diverse and potentially conflicted nature of these emergent communication processes.

Panel Digi003
Inheritance of the digital: ethnographic approaches to everyday realities in, of, and through digital technologies
  Session 1