Technology and affect: Towards a theory of inorganically organised objects

Abstract

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‘At least in person there would have been a cup of tea’: interviewing via Skype

“…We, however, explore how and why research interviews carried out via Skype with video might feel different from in person interviews for participants. In order to further thinking on this topic, we draw mainly on Lefebvre's () concept of ‘rhythm’, but also on ideas put forward by Ash () in a range of work on digital interfaces, spatialities and affect. More about the broader project on Skype and how the research was carried out can be found in Longhurst (forthcoming), but that work is underpinned by Ahmed's () Queer phenomenology rather than Lefebvre's and Ash's work.…”

The floating churches of Volgograd: River topologies and warped spatialities of faith

“…Things and affects could have “potent” afterlives (Thrift, , p. 9) and, as Ash contends, “it is [often] the afterlives of affects that have the biggest impact on the beings exposed to them” (, p. 90). Creativity is redolent here of the “residual surplus” things drag along in their becoming and unbecoming.…”

Subjectivity 2.0: Digital technologies, participatory media and communicative capitalism

“…Accounts of technological affordances, for instance, as discussed earlier, paint a more complex picture, in suggesting that digital media have their attributes defined relationally through the milieu in which they are used (Ash, 2014). These attributes emerge via processes that range from remediation (the social uses of older technologies influencing people's engagements with new ones) to novel cultural norms becoming attached to specific media within a community due to the specific needs and values of that community (Madianou and Miller, 2013).…”

“…For Dean this reflects the way that: 'communicative capitalism fragments thought into ever smaller bits, bits that can be distributed and sampled, even ingested and enjoyed, but that in the glut of multiple, circulating contributions tend to resist recombination into longer, more demanding theories' (Dean, 2010: 2). Not only, therefore, does this pose a threat to the more participatory audiences that certain commentators argue can rejuvenate more critical perspectives towards the mass media (Meikle, 2008), but also to the potential for inter-subjective political action based on mutual understanding (Hands, 2010 suggested that the affordances of communications media are established through intersubjective practice (Madianou and Miller, 2013;Cammaerts, 2014) and emerge through their broader socio-technical milieu, rather than being intrinsic to the technologies themselves (Ash, 2014). In offering a model that is simultaneously critical of digital media, yet refuses to prescribe rigid models of subjective engagements with these technologies, conceptions of technological affordances offer valuable tools for reconceptualising the digital subject.…”