Fibreculture Journal Issue 25—Apps and Affect. This is issue was edited by Svitlana Matviyenko, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Alison Hearn, and, from the journal’s side, Andrew Murphie.
You can read online, or download individual or issue pdfs or epubs here:
FCJ-179 On Governance, Blackboxing, Measure, Body, Affect and Apps: A conversation with Patricia Ticineto Clough and Alexander R. Galloway—Svitlana Matviyenko, Patricia Ticineto Clough & Alexander R Galloway
FCJ-180 ‘Spotify Has Added an Event to Your Past’: (Re)writing the Self through Facebook’s Autoposting Apps—Tanya Kant
FCJ-181 There’s a History for That: Apps and Mundane Software as Commodity—Jeremy Wade Morris and Evan Elkins
FCJ-182 Middlebroware—Frédérik Lesage
FCJ-183 iHootenanny: A Folk Archeology of Social Media—Henry Adam Svec
FCJ-184 Interpassive User: Complicity and the Returns of Cybernetics—Svitlana Matviyenko
FCJ-185 An Algorithmic Agartha: Post-App Approaches to Synarchic Regulation—Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
FCJ-186 Hack for good: Speculative labour, app development and the burden of austerity—Melissa Gregg
FCJ-187 The Droning of Experience—Mark Andrejevic
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This issue of the Fibreculture Journal explores a moment along this hypothetical trajectory by investigating the contemporary intersection of ‘Apps and Affect’, publishing papers from a conference of that name organised in October 2013 by faculty and students at Western University (specifically from its Faculty of Information and Media Studies and Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism). By recognising apps as objects that are related to the constitution of subjects, as a component of biopolitical assemblages, and as a means of digital production and consumption, our conference aimed to make an intervention in what had – since the announcements of the App-Store and the iPhone3 in 2008 – been a largely technical and rather technophiliac public discussion of apps.
Isn’t it paradoxical, we asked, that instead of becoming ‘transparent’ and ‘invisible’ – as envisioned by the thinkers of ubiquitous computing decades ago – the app-ecosystem manifests itself as permanent excess: excessive downloads, excessive connections, excessive proximity, excessive ‘friends’-qua-‘contacts’, excessive speeds and excessive amounts of information? How does the app as ‘technique’ (Tenner), indeed as ‘cultural technique’ (Siegert) and as ‘technics’ (Stiegler), channel our ways of maintaining relations with/in the media environment? Do the specific and circumscribed operations of individual applications foster or foreclose what media theorists call the transformative and transductive potential of collective technological individuation (Simondon)? How might we think about the social, political and technical implications of this movement away from open-ended networks like the internet towards specific, focused, and individualised modes of computing? Do apps represent ‘a new reticular condition of trans-individuation grammatising new forms of social relations’ (Stiegler) or do they signal instead the triumph of ‘regulatory’ networks over ‘generative’ ones (Zittrain)? If apps are micro-programs residing by the hundreds and thousands on cell-phones, mobile-devices and tablets, and affects are corporeal excitements (and depressions) running beneath and beyond cognition, what is the relation of apps to affects?
—the Editors
VIRALITY 