Studia Kulturoznawcze 3(13)/2017 - Mobile Media Research

studia

kulturoznawcze

3(13)/2017

MOBILE MEDIA RESEARCH

studia

kulturoznawcze

3(13)/2017

studia

kulturoznawcze

3(13)/2017

MOBILE MEDIA RESEARCH

Poznań 2017

STUDIA KULTUROZNAWCZE NR 3(13) ROK 2017 Rada Redakcyjna

Wojciech Chyła, Grzegorz Dziamski, Jan Grad, Anna Grzegorczyk, Krzysztof Moraczewski, Magdalena Kamińska (redaktor naczelna), Jacek Sójka, Ewa Rewers, Juliusz Tyszka, Andrzej Zaporowski

Rada Programowa

Michał Błażejewski, Kazimierz Braun, Leszek Brogowski, Piotr Dahlig, Ewa Kosowska, Sławomir Magala

Kontakt

Instytut Kulturoznawstwa Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu 60-568 Poznań, ul. Szamarzewskiego 89c, pok. 25 e-mail: studiakulturoznawcze@gmail.com

Redakcja naukowa dr Tomasz Żaglewski

Recenzenci

dr Radosław Bomba dr Grzegorz Stunża

Redakcja i korekta

Adriana Staniszewska, Michał Staniszewski

Projekt okładki

Adriana Staniszewska Copyright © Wydawnictwo Naukowe Wydziału Nauk Społecznych UAM w Poznaniu, 2017 Publikacja finansowana z funduszy Instytutu Kulturoznawstwa UAM w Poznaniu

ISSN 2084-2988 Wydawnictwo Naukowe Wydziału Nauk Społecznych Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu

60-568 Poznań, ul. Szamarzewskiego 89c

Druk: Zakład Poligraficzny Moś i Łuczak sp.j.

ul. Piwna 1, 61-065 Poznań

Nakład: 80 egz.

contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Mobile Media Studies as Visual Studies Marianna Michałowska Visual Research in Motion: Between a Reflection on Visuality and Survey Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Ewa Wójtowicz Seeing the Invisible. The Emersion of Data in Post-Media Realities . . . . . . . . . . .

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Mobile Cultural Practices Agnieszka Dytman-Stasieńko Mobile Infoactivism – Development, Typology, Technological Contexts . . . . . . . .

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Agata Skórzyńska “The Students’ Flat Project.” Mobile Media and Educational Research Workshop Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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From Saturation of Media to Saturation of Data Katarzyna Kopecka-Piech Media Saturation as a Techno-Social Phenomenon. Selected Examples of Smartphonisation in Social Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Paweł Wieczorek Algorithm as a Dealer of Compulsive Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

Re-presentations of Mobile Media Piotr Aptacy Steve Jobs – the Ascent to the Digital Pantheon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Tomasz ŝaglewski Mobile Imagination in Graphic Storytelling: Using a Graphic Novel Format as a Tool/Area of Visual and Mobile Media Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

Introduction

In 2014, the Institute of Culture Studies saw the launch of the research project entitled Mobility: Media, Urban Practices and Students’ Culture. We were interested in examining the transformations in contemporary culture that owe to the ever more natural presence of mobile media (both devices and applications) as well as increasing opportunities for physical mobility among inhabitants of cities today. The research team (Magdalena Kamińska, Marianna Michałowska, Agata Skórzyńska, Jadwiga Zimpel, Jacek Zydorowicz, Tomasz Żaglewski) have invited the subject of investigations, in other words the protagonists of the changes – the students – to participate and carry out their own research projects. Their case studies became the source of invaluable insights into the media-related experience of the young generation of users of mobile devices, as well as their involvement in the dynamic culture. Also, one has to bear in mind that the mobility of participants in contemporary culture is no longer limited to physical space but may denote “cybermobility” as well. The latter is discussed by among others Peter Adey and Paul Bevan, who understand it as “connected mobility of bits and information and their relationship with the subsequent movement of people and objects.” Numerous current studies regarding mobility take advantage of visual methods and target the domain of visual phenomena (photographs, films, blogs, interactive visual projects, maps); it would therefore appear that visuality – from the observation of mobile phenomena to their documentation and production – is a major factor determining the methodologies and the object of inquiry. Scholarly reflection on visuality drifts between two extremes: marginalisation and domination. This polarity of approaches in research is referred to by Gillian Rose, who writes that while initially “visual representations have been largely ignored in the social sciences,” what we witness now is a “fetishization of visual methods.” Yet the crux of the matter is that visuality needs to be taken into account without being absolutized. This is well demonstrated in studies into mobile media, which simultaneously utilise it and constitute visual items themselves (e.g. smartphones as visual objects or graphic interfaces of apps), as well as engender sensory interaction involving sound, touch and space.

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Introduction

The articles included in this issue constitute a commentary to one of the many aspects of conducted research. As we focused on the relationships between visuality and mobile culture, we have decided to invite media researchers from across Poland to collaborate. Consequently, certain aspects of inquiry that lie beyond our competence, such as the artistic, political and technological dimensions of mobility could be taken into consideration.

We attached importance to ontic questions, such as the status of visuality in the world of mobile technologies, as well as epistemological issues: the visual description, the experience of mobility and the usefulness of visual methods in studying said experience. We were thus interested in at least two dimensions of investigations into mobility: the application of mobile media in visuality research and visualisations of mobility in the cultural space.

The texts collected in this volume have been divided into four sections relating to questions about the visuality of movement, mobile practices of media users, media and data saturation, and representations of mobility. It was our chief goal to feature papers which draw on specific examples of contemporary cultural practice, therefore they may be seen as an overview of the manifestations of mobility witnessed today.

The first part, “Mobile Media Studies as Visual Studies,” begins with a text in which Marianna Michałowska discusses the theoretical framework established for visual studies of mobility. This area of interest is probed further by Ewa Wójtowicz in a study of emersive media which explore the boundaries between the visible and the invisible. The analysis also demonstrates the potential to integrate artistic and engineering disciplines that mobile technologies appear to harbour.

In the following part, entitled “Mobile Cultural Practices,” Agnieszka Dytman-Stasieńko takes a look at mobile infoactivism, deliberating on how the access to data and its flow may support actions geared towards mental, political, social or economic change. Subsequently, relying on the research into modes of habitation conducted by students, Agata Skórzyńska analyses the ways in which mobile media can be applied in educational practice. In this case, visuality is both the object and the tool of analysis.

Part three, “From Media Saturation to Saturation of Data,” shifts the attention to correlations between mobile technologies, changes in communication processes and access to information. Katarzyna Kopecka-Piech shows how media saturation – the permeation of cultural reality with technological extensions of our presence in the world – generates new cultural activities, as evinced by “smartphonisation” of communication. Access to information and its management is also discussed by Paweł Wieczorek who exposes the mechanism of network surveillance through an analysis of algorithms in social media.

Introduction

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Finally, the section entitled “Re-presentations of Mobile Media” focuses on how mobile media are depicted in popular culture. Piotr Aptacy’s text concerns the iconisation of the figure of Steve Jobs, a process that was sealed with a number of cinema productions, whereas Tomasz Żaglewski delves, in the manner of an archaeologist, into graphic novels, finding artefacts which in a sense, were harbingers of contemporary mobile devices such as cell phones or smartwatches.

Hence, in this issue, visuality is shown as an aspect of contemporary mobile culture; it may be ubiquitous but it is not dominant. For this reason, we present it as something more than an image: an essential trait of devices, applications and interfaces which enables us to communicate with devices, and one of the means (next to sound, smell, and touch) of experiencing movement and being in motion.

Marianna Michałowska

Mobile media studies as visual studies

Marianna Michałowska Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań Institute of Cultural Studies

Visual Research in Motion: Between a Reflection on Visuality and Survey Practices

While developing the idea of a research project titled Mobility, media, urban practices and students’ culture our small team1 established three general questions: 1) How the city space is experienced by means of expanding mobile technologies and how it influences city subjects’ cultural activity?; 2) What kind of cultural studies methodology may be the most effective in research of interplay between mediatisation and participation in urban cultures?; 3) What is the capability and influence of students on city cultures and may a students’ agency be seen as a specific city culture? The inquires of the above issues go far beyond the frames of my brief paper. This is why the range of my reflection will focus only on one aspect of the issues raised by the aforementioned question – on the conditions of using visual methods in the research of mobility. The aim of my article is to propose a conceptual framework for studies on visual mobile technologies and to verify their practical use in a survey. By the term “visual mobile technologies” I mean “the machines of vision” (to use Paul Virilio’s phrase) as photography (together with its’ predecessors like camera obscura, camera lucida and Leonardo’s veil), film, video, mobiles and theirs applications.

However, I am not only interested in technical tools, but mainly in the contemporary phenomena of physical movement of bodies (human, animals and objects) and communicative mobility (as creation of cultural, technologically mediated systems of communication). Therefore, three general fields of research 1 Mobility: media, urban practices and sudents’ culture, a research project founded by Polish National Centre for Science, no 2014/13/B/HS2/00109, research team: Marianna Michałowska, Magdalena Kamińska, Agata Skórzyńska, Jadwiga Zimpel, Jacek Zydorowicz, Tomasz Żaglewski.

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have emerged: the first was focused on visual methods (including perception of mobility and its cultural metaphors), the second concerned the status of visual technologies and – the third, which was devoted to the idea of mediated communication enabled by technical tools.

The basis for my studies are a wide range of qualitative visual research, represented by contemporary scholars who specialized in varied branches of disciplines related to visualities as visual anthropology and sociology (Richard Chalfen, Louis Pauwels, Marcus Banks), visual studies (Hall Foster, Gillian Rose), and media communication (among others Mikko Villi, Kenneth Lundby, Marscha Berry). It is worth to remember however that today’s theoretical framework of visual research has a debt to pay to the founders of semiology (Roland Barthes), psychology of perception (Rudolf Arnheim), culture studies (Stuart Hall) and post-structuralist like Michel Foucault, Paul Virilio or Jean Baudrillard.

The common issue for most of those approaches is an assumption of a close relationship between shapes of societies and their cultural representations (expressed in language as well as in images). Writers such as John Berger, Martin Jay or Nicholas Mirzeoff emphasised the role of eye and vision in construction of a worldview in concepts of “scopic regime” or ocularcentrism of Western culture and its’ rooting in Western inclination towards technological gadgets.

Nowadays, those concepts have evolved into a reflection on performative aspects of vision (William J.T. Mitchell), multisensorial character of seeing and mediative function of technologies.

In this paper I will focus on the chosen possibilities of employing visual research in studies on urban mobility. In consecutive sections of the text, I am going to present a brief overview on visual methods; cultural concepts of movement perception in relation to visual technologies; and finally I will introduce three case studies based on research work completed by students of the Institute of Cultural Studies of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań in 2015 and 2016.

1. Visual research in cultural studies In this section I will define briefly my position towards using visual methods in “reading” cultural phenomena. The majority of visual scholars start their books from classification of scientific aims and methods, which are used in research.

Thus, in regards to Marcus Banks’s concept, there are two main areas in using visual methods in social sciences. According to the first concept, the images are used in the study of society, and in the second, the images are studied sociologically.2 In turn Luc Pauwels proposes a typology that arouses the seminal question: 2 M. Banks, Materiały wizualne w badaniach jakościowych, transl. P. Tomanek, Warszawa 2009, p. 28.

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[...] whether to use (or restrict oneself to using) existing visual material (“found” visuals) as primary data for research or to initiate as a researcher first-hand observations or visual products.3

In result, he finds three initial categories. The first one refers to the origin and production of a context of visuals and contain the following: Found materials as a data source, researcher-initiated production of visual data and meanings, secondary research uses and respondent-generated material; the second category recalls to the issue of referent and subject of research; and finally the third analyses visual media and technique of research.

It is noticeable that both scholars focus mainly on epistemological aspects of research and are interested more on visual methods than on methodologies of visual studies (taking them implicitly). Gillian Rose proposes a different approach, starting from the description of the most common visual methodologies4 for cultural studies and to explore the field of approaches to semiology, phenomenology or psychoanalysis and to identify the best use of methods such as photo-elicitation, or photo-documentation.5 Although the conceptual and reflective Rose’s attitude towards visual research seems to me more intriguing than focused on practical application propositions of Banks and Pauwels, I find the necessity of integration of both.

I would define the visual research as a complementary set of reflections and activities towards the broadly understood vision and visuality. They include interpretative procedures initiated towards material phenomena observable by a researcher in real time as well as towards images produced by others, and actions in the space taken by means of visual technologies. Thus, we can distinguish three areas of interest regarding visual research: a reflection on vision and cultural conditions of seeing, a study of images and acting with images or around images.

1. In regard to the first area of interest, I assume (following the steps of Hal Foster) that there is a need to make a distinction between vision and visuality, which allows us to differentiate a biological construction of sight from a cultural character of seeing. As Foster writes: L. Pauwels, Visual Sociology Reframed: An Analytical Synthesis and Discussion of Visual Methods in Social and Cultural Research, “Sociological Methods & Research” 38(4)/2010, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0049124110366233, p. 584 [2.08.2017].

4 Briefly, to distinguish a method from methodology, we have to remember that the first sends us towards a practical use of certain surveys (like visual analysis, an interview based on photographs, or visual essay), and the second, to the theoretical framework that stands beyond our worldview and lets us develop a research question (How we understand culture? What is representation? What is visuality?).

5 G. Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, Los Angeles – London – New Delhi 2010.

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[...] here, the difference between the terms signals a difference within the visualbetween the mechanism of sight and its historical techniques, between the datum of vision and its discursive determinations – a difference, many differences, among how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein.6

Representing the post-structural criticisms of the scopic regimes of modernity, Foster’s distinction between vision and visuality was not entirely new in thinking about art. In Theory of Vision finally published in 1956, Polish avantgarde artist and theoretician Władysław Strzemiński wrote: [...] we distinguish seeing (in biological sense) from a conscience of vision. As the first one depends on slow biological evolution and probably in long time will stay unchanged, the second grows in history.7

What was important for Strzemiński is not only how the sight works, but essentially how a perception is culturally interpreted. The relationship between the above can be found when we try to explain varied concepts of why we see.

Historically, each cultural formation produced their own clarification of vision – it could be dependent on religion or authority of sciences. Let’s look at an example I hypothesized – an explanation of how the sight works given by a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, Empedocles. In his poetic description, he describes the image of vision as a dynamic attraction of opposites. The image appears in the space between the observer and the observable object. As written by Rudolf Arnheim, these early explanations of vision goes together with a concept of active visual perception, which is a thought based on a popular idea in ancient Greece. According to Hellenic concept, vision requires an activity of an eye that touches the objects in the space.8 What is more, the Empedoclean explanation joins physical qualities with Gods’ attributes. Thus one may notice that the observation, which basically referred to natural phenomena, was supported with cultural explanation. Our contemporary concept of vision, developed by neurobiology leaves a place both for biological conditions of eye and brain and for cultural interpretation of that what is perceived – namely visuality.

2. Let’s move to the second area of interest listed above, the study of images. We can distinguish there a stage of observation, a stage of analysis and a stage of interpretation of observable material objects and actions, images produced by a researcher or possessed from others. Visual anthropologist Richard Chalfen attempts to describe a field of study for visual research. He is inter-

H. Foster, Preface, in H. Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle 1988, p. IX. W. Strzemiński, Teoria widzenia, Łódź 2016, p. 55.

8 R. Arnheim, Myślenie wzrokowe, transl. M. Chojnacki, Gdańsk 2011, p. 30.

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ested in “‘looking’ (‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’) as a culturally variable activity.”9 The verb “to look” might be used in reference to the conscience of an observer and to how the observable phenomena appears to the observer. Therefore “to look” means to observe physical objects, to analyse images (drawings, paintings, photographs and films) and provide towards an interpretation of observable human actions and its representations. As Chalfen realised the approach is usually employed in sociology and ethnography, disciplines that from its origin were interested at “how people look” and focused “on dimensions of how members of specific groups of people appear to themselves and to others.”10 and how people do not want to appear to others. The analysis of observable human behaviour includes a reflection of performances taken by people to look and appear to others in a certain way. Chalfen in his article regards to exemplary studies on posture, gesture, and body movement by Alan Lomax, studies on socialization by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead and also to researches on dance movements by Pallabi Chakravorty.11 Chalfen’s study on “looking” an “seeing” directs our attention towards the issues of “vision” and “visuality.” What do we see? Why do we see? How do we see? And on the contrary, what do we not see? As Chalfen stated: [...] we must consider the ways people don’t look – we need to add what people should not look at, should not see – to the previously mentioned ideas of how people should not appear in private or public.12

In fact, the questioning of why we do not see certain situations applies to the same discussion on visuality. In order to explain the cultural phenomenon of not seeing, allow me to share an example.

The action of fantasy novel The City & the City by Londoner China Miéville takes place in two cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which are located in exactly the same geographical space. Due to political and ethnic conflict between the cities, they are perceived by inhabitants as two different cities. People learned how to “unsee” the fragments of architecture, an urban plan of streets and finally, how to “unsee” the citizens of the second city. Each act of seeing the other is punished. In result, people from Besźel do not see Ul Qoma, and “Ulqomarnians” do not see “Besźelnians.”

On the one hand, the political concept of Miéville could be compared to the idea introduced by Erving Goffman. A “civil inattention” regarding to Goff R. Chalfen, Looking Two Ways: Mapping the Social Scientific Study of Visual Culture, in E. Margolis, L. Pauwels (eds), The Sage Handbook of Visual Reaserch Methods, London 2011, p. 24.

10 Ibidem, p. 28.

11 Ibidem, p. 30.

12 Ibidem, p. 32.

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man can be used to describe rules of so called cultural behaviour. Also Chalfen regards to a concept of “civil inattention.” He remains that sometimes such inattention helps people to organize society.13 In Goffman’s theory “unseeing,” similarly to “seeing” are basis in communication processes. It can be read in one of his essays: [...] the symbol of this arrangement is civil inattention, the process of glancing at an other to express that one has no untoward intent nor expects to be an object of it, and then turning the glance away, in a combination of trust, respect, and apparent unconcern.14

On the other hand, the Miéville’s concept fits well with another study of visuality. A visual scholar, Ariella Azoulay reminds us about a notion taken from Foucault’s dictionary – “a surface of appearing.” She re-interprets the term to emphasize the importance of political powers that have images gathered in institutional archives.15 Thus, “the surface of appearing” is a phrase that means cultural content that can be expressed in language and images in a particular system of representation. In the Azoulay’s concept the task of people is to recognise the shape of ”the surface of appearing” and oppose the dictatorship of things that are “unseen” and thus overlooked in the public discourse. Therefore, Azoulay emphasizes the significance of so-called “civic imagination,” the ability that allows people to realize how institutions manipulate social behaviours.

Therefore to see Ul Qoma, the Besźelnians should have the competence of visual literacy and understand that they inhabit the same space as their enemies.

Chalfen’s reflection considers both dimensions of “look” to the analyses of human presence and their behaviours. However, we also look for objects and sometimes we are seen by them (as we are seen by satellites and cameras in urban monitoring systems). Human presence might be examined in addition of the effects of people’s activities: spatial design, construction and use of objects, traces of human flows (to use John Urry’s term), observation and interpretation of internet behaviours (the object of interest of nethnography) or cultural practices towards visual technologies (what people do with images and how they treat tools that enable them?).16 I will look closer on these aspects of visual methods in the second part of the article.

Ibidem, p. 33.

E. Goffman, The Arrangement between the Sexes, “Theory and Society” 4(3)/1977, pp. 301-331; JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/656722, p. 327 [2.08.2017].

15 K. Pijarski (ed.), The Archive as Project, Warszawa 2011, p. 539.

16 I mean here a proposition of two Polish sociologists: Marek Krajewski and Rafał Drozdowski who postulated the introducing of radical programme of visual sociology. See R. Drozdowski, M. Krajewski, Za fotografię! W stronę radykalnego programu socjologii wizualnej, Warszawa 2010.

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3. Yet, let’s try very briefly, to characterise visual methods which are based on performing images and visual technologies. Although, as I have already specified the seeing is an act, this kind of research method inclines towards a conscious intervention of a researcher into perceived space. It might be an act of documenting something, a collaboration with a research group or the interpretation of the act of seeing. In this room, we have varieties of collaborative projects: workshops, visual walks (Sarah Pink’s idea) or artistic provocations.

I assume that the knowledge of that we see and how we see, might activate a conscious perception of reality (coming back to Miéville’s example – there will be something what will make Besźelnians see Ul Quma). The areas mentioned above, do work in visual research projects together and determine subsequent stages of reflection on visual material. Though so far I wrote only about visual materials, it is worth to remember that visual research does not have to employ visual technologies. For a long time, scholars observed and interpreted visual phenomena without cameras or digital applications. However, photography and film opened up a new phase of visual research: visual material started to be used firstly just as a note that accompanies field research, but soon became the tool of researcher practice (as in Pink’s practice of walking with video). Following the thought of William J.T. Mitchell one could say that the idea of visual media is a myth. “All media are mixed media, with varying ratios of senses and sign types”17 – Mitchell stated. Does that observation change anything in the range of visual methods? Actually, not. When we analyse the particular techniques used by researchers, we will see that they are (and have to be) interdisciplinary.

We deal with image-text or audio-visual methods like digital storytelling, photoelicitation, visual essays and many others. However, all of these let us find out what is visuality and gives us insight into another dimension of human experience, a dimension that often slips away out of language.

2. To see a movement – to see in motion The main topics of my article are visual methods towards the mobile phenomena. Each method described above include a particular relation to mobility. The first relation describes the observer’s movement towards stationary objects, while the second accounts for the movement of the objects themselves. The technical tools – a photographic or film camera (and its predecessors – box camera obscura)18 were movable. As a matter of fact, the ability of seeing culturally was linked with movements – of eye or perception of moving objects.

W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, Chicago 2005, p. 343.

That note is necessary, because I do not mention here neither natural spaces (as caves) that can be used as camera obscura nor architectural constructions as observation towers.

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Let’s come back once more to our Empedoclean argument. The Greek concept of vision seems more contemporary than we thought, because today it is emphasized that we perceive thanks to the micro-movements of eyeballs that (to say metaphorically) “touch” the objects in space. Arnheim emphasised that “the sense of sight works selectively”19 and depends on the observer’s perception. That’s human mind that gives a sense to a perception of the observer. Arnheim recalls that the selectivity of vision is already present at the level of retina.

Therefore, he explains the human ability of perceiving changes: of light, shapes, colours or scales biologically. It is connected with natural reaction to upcoming danger and the necessity to hide. On the contrary, long-lasting immobility, that is an effect of the lack of moving stimuli elicits boredom.20 The emergence of visual technologies, which enabled the mechanical registration of time, has changed our cultural concept of seeing movement. It is convincingly enlightened by Paul Virilio in The Vision Machine. Media theoreticians located the issue of perception not only in regard to biological construction of sight, but mainly towards the cultural concept of how we see. Virilio opens the book with recalling a dialogue between August Rodin and Paul Gsell. Gsell express his doubts towards the realism of movement sculptured in Rodin’s figure of St. John. Rodin answers that his aim was to present a movement differently than in instantaneous photograph that display “a man struck with paralysis” and says: People in photographs suddenly seem frozen in mid-air, despite being caught in full swing: this is because every part of their body is reproduced at exactly the same twentieth or fortieth of the second, so there is no gradual unfolding of a gesture, as there is in art.21

Virilio distinguish an idea of realism from veracity, accordant to imaginary of movement. Rodin’s veracity which included a lack of details in representation of a movable object (still, one can find this particular bluntness in many contemporary visual representations from Richter paintings to comics and graphic novels) was a reverse of photographical “detailed” vision – a registration of all particulars of objects and “frozen” time. To see a movement by Rodin did not mean to make it stop. In “The art of Great Avant-garde,” Rodin’s thinking was continued in artistic manifestos of futurism and constructivism. Anton G. Bragalia created photographs which were supposed to reflect an idea of the eternal movement of energy. His image of movement was presented in one frame similarly to multi-exposed chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey and differed from multiply frames displayed in studies of movement by Éed R. Arnheim, Myślenie wzrokowe…, p. 49.

Ibidem, pp. 31-32.

21 P. Virilio, The Vision Machine, transl. J. Rose, Bloomington – Indianapolis 1994, p. 1.

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weard Muybridge that were so annoying for Rodin. The basis here is a concept of simultaneity. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy wrote in Vision in motion: Vision in motion is simultaneous grasp. Simultaneous grasp is creative performance – seeing, feeling and thinking in relationship and not as a series of isolated phenomena. It instantaneously integrates single elements into a coherent whole. This is valid for physical vision as well as for the abstract. [...] Vision in motion is seeing while moving.22

Similar tries of expressing modern mobility can be found in Dziga Vertov’s or Walter Ruttmann’s films. Quick montage, used by filmmakers did not allow a stable image on viewer’s retina, they moved in a continuous flow.

Analyses of media mobility do not end on questions about perception of movements. The same regards to the movements of camera-equipped bodies.

The invention of photography and film has claimed two kinds of human desires: a desire for fixing a movement and a desire for seeing in distance which a hundred years later, was called a tele-presence or remote presence (the term by Michael Heim23), an existence in distance. Visual technologies could become mobile because they were convenient and handy. The photographer could leave a studio with his/her Kodak Brownie or Leica, a cameraman could produce images of open space quickly. A prevalence of invention of cinématographe over other forms of early film machines was its convenience. Louis Lumière’s construction weighed only 1/100 of Thomas Edison’s cinemascope and could be packed into a suitcase. It did not need any outer sources of energy and was “an ideal tool of catching the life in move – sur le vif, as Lumière said.”24 Camera operators were sent by Lumières to far places of the globe, they presented films, made new footage during the day, developed it in a hotel room and again presented them in the evening. An audience could see the places they had never seen before – the process of mediatisation of presence began.

The mobility of technologies might be analysed also in relationship with its transformation in time. Dietmar Kamper has stated once that “machines can die,” however Siegfried Zielinski added that they can be resurrected.25 Their revival is never the same, configured and reshaped anew. Those revivals (haunting as Derrida would had said) rarely are based on original construction, but mostly on the sense of its action. Zielinski advised to give up on the idea of never-ending technological progress and to turn to the concept of the spiral circulation of ideas and techniques. “There is nothing stable in a culture of the L. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, Chicago 1947, p. 12.

M. Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, Oxford 1993, p. 127.

24 E. Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film, Oxford 1993, p. 7.

25 S. Zielinski, Deep Time of Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, transl. G. Custance, Cambridge, Mass. 2006, p. 1.

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technical world,” says Zielinski and illustrates it with a comparison taken from two pillars of technology history: “computers were, and still are designed for their users like a camera obscura; one works with them, enjoys the effects they produce, and has no access to their mode of functioning.”26 Contemporary mobile technologies, identified mainly with mobile personal computers, cell phones and smartphones are a good example of Zielinski circulation of ideas, because they mix all the inventions by humanity to communicate and move from one place to another. They convey images and texts, voice and appearance. In the construction of mobile devices we will find the results of research provided in Silicon Valley from 1960 (the idea of combining a phone with a camera was initiated in Bell’s laboratories in 1950) and a long tradition of cultural communication. They are, what is the most important, “handy” (in German a mobile phone is even called “das Handy”). Thanks to those wieldy, small machines, freed from wires which linked them to the stable system of electricity, the sense of our “being” in the world has ultimately changed, enabling to exist “here” and “there,” both physically and when our presence is technologically mediated.

William J.T. Mitchell (not to be confused with the author of What Do Pictures Want?) noticed hope for an educational system in technological mobility.

In Placing Words he wrote: Mobility means that computers no longer establish fixed, specialized sites of learning. Instead, they enhance the potential of every sort of space to support intellectual activity.27

Undoubtedly, Mitchell overestimated intellectual possibilities of mobility, we see mostly its commercial and popular dimension. Nevertheless, we could ask, what kind of mobile practice is visible? Undoubtedly, communicative practices are partly (because they are mostly multi-sensual) visual. We see mobile phones, but also we are looking at the displays fulfilled with visual elements, and what is more we are using visual symbols and taking photos to communicate with others.

The communicative aspect of visual communication is in the core of reflection of scholars like Mikko Villi, Matteo Stochetti, Edgar Gomez Cruz, Gerard Goggin or Paul Levinson, whose attention is focused on mobile phone technologies. In regards to their observation, mobile communication (both verbal and visual) supports a certain kind of absence and does not support the actual presence of communicating agents. On the one hand, mobile phones seem to rather separate from those who are in the physical closeness and connect with some Ibidem, p. 258.

W.J.T. Mitchell, Placing Words, London 2005, p. 102.

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body who is located in distance (as Villi and Stochetti observe).28 On the other hand, participants of culture communicating with each other is also a situation of physical closeness. That is the argument for those scholars who state that it is possible to exist in augmented reality both material and virtual at the same time and experience the sensations coming from both.

Though Villi, Stochetti and Cruz emphasise the functions of images produced by mobile phones in interpersonal communication undoubtedly they remoulded the space were the presentation of images take place. Dean Keep notices: Camera phone photography may be understood as a multi-faceted and dynamic imaging practice shaped by the constant ebb and flow of emergent communication technologies and the shape-shifting nature of mobile media.29

On the one hand, through the means of mobile photography, the importance of web portals like Instagram has grown. On the other, it changes the sense of being with others. The practice of programs that enables communication in real time transform the function of photographic documentation. It is no longer a documentation of past events, but a signal of simultaneous connection with our close. Thus, Villi and Stochetti in their analysis of mobile photography deconstructed Barthes’ noema of image and wrote: Photo messaging is, therefore, more about communicating over space than communicating over time.30

Contemporary researchers of mobile media emphasise that because of mobile visual technologies, the need for sensual experience increases. The static observation (typical for Foucault’s theory of panopticon) is replaced by “mapping” of “scanning” the space which is a feature of physical movement of the human bodies and non-human objects (John Urry) that incorporate both sight as hearing, smelling and touching. In a result, sight is no longer perceived as the main human sense and is treated as a carrier of superficial sensations, while the other senses are seen as more important sources of experience. Mobile technologies enrich the imagination of the city space and ways of communication with others. Although the communities became short-termed, the intensity of individual relationships increases. Simultaneously, the value of material objects grows to what is reflected in humans’ attachment to items. The interest 28 M. Villi, M. Stochetti, Visual mobile communication, mediated presence and the politics of space, “Visual Studies” 26(2)/2011.

29 D. Keep, Artist with a Camera-Phone: A Decade of Mobile Photography, in M. Berry, M. Schleser (eds), Mobile Media Making in an Age of Smartphones, New York 2014, p. 15.

30 M. Villi, M. Stochetti, Visual mobile communication..., p. 106.

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in the role of objects and technological devices found its representation in new theoretical domains like sociology and anthropology of things (Igor Kopytoff, Elisabeth Edwards, Janice Hart), or archaeology of the closest past (Michael Shanks) and cultural ecology (Ben Cullen). In everyday practice, the growing interest with objects may be found in such activities as personalisation of devices, the popularity of touch-screens (like smartphones and displays). Objects are “taught” to react on humans’ sensual acting such as talking or touching.

Technical devices have become mobile to facilitate linguistic and visual communication between individuals. Transmitted messages are travelling between us.

The appearance here is only one of the sensual dimensions of technologies. It is important for users how devices and application look like, are they convenient and “readable,” but also how they enable communication by means of touch and sound. The other aspects introduce the issue of what visual issue can be recorded or reshaped.

To sum up: mobility here is conceptualised in two ways, as physical movement in the material space and virtual mobility in the space accessible by technological means. These two types of mobility are experiences by the city subject in the same moment. At the same time, new technologies are are a good tool to study the multisensory experience of space. As I mentioned above, Mikko Villi stated that the main objective of mobile media is communication and not visual production. However, can visuality of mobile devices be helpful in the practice of research? We will analyse this closely by examining three students’ projects.

3. What have students seen?

3.1. The city in motion: green and safe – observation of human’s behaviour in regard to urban movements In 2015, within the research framework “City in motion: green and safe” students of our Institute started a research project31 devoted to the system of street communication in Poznań. As written in the introductory commentary, they wanted to acquire answers surrounding two questions: “Is Poznań a safe city for its inhabitants? And do inhabitants feel safe in Poznań?” Students used a film documentation to record what happens on pedestrian crossing, and a visual analysis to interpret the effect of the recording. They also invited physically handicapped persons to collaborate and to check if the city space is adapted to their needs. They filmed in a few chosen locations: on pedestrian crossing in 31 The project of students of Institute of Cultural Studies (research grant funded by PZU).

Authors: Magdalena Frąszczak, Maria Miszczak, Marta Samsel, Mateusz Włodarek.

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the centre of the city, close to railway station, on the main stairs in the historical district of Wilda and on a small street in Jeżyce.

In regards to Chalfen’s concept, we can say that students were interested in how people look and how their bodies behave in the public space. The simple recording of mobility of human flows taken with an immovable camera on a tripod gave a persuasive argument in discussing the urban planning. They observed how pedestrians do not respect the red lights, how car drivers do not respect the pedestrian rights and how ineffective is the “language of traffic lights” in regards to the needs of handicapped people.

To express their observation to the viewers, students employed the methods of film montage. The structure of the film is not complicated. It is composed from two or three minute sequences which present the actions in varied forms of urban passages: the aforementioned pedestrian crossing in the busy part of the city allowed them to document the other type of people’s behaviour than what was observed on the historic stairs. They chose not use additional music in order to focus only on the realistic sounds of the urban noise. There is no spoken commentaries, but the sequences are divided with boards with information about locations and dates.

Marcus Banks states that the essential part of the process of creating the image is a researchers’ reflection, which allows to answer the following questions: “What do I want to grasp? Why do I take photographs right now? What is left beyond the frame?”32 Students took this process into account by a processual reworking of the footage: they returned many times to the filmed location, experimented with various camera angles, and supplemented the film with new sequences. During the final phase of production, which was a montage of the footage, they chose not to use parts of material that were the least representative for the message they wanted to convey. Their project demonstrated that the use of visual material cannot be “objective,” but it can communicate premediated information.

Victor Caldarola has formulated three preconditions for photography which also describe well the situation of film production. Firstly, images are a representation of specific events; secondly, the meaning of each photograph stems from a context in which it was taken; and for the third, photographing and filming process is a social event, which includes the interaction of those who photograph, those who are photographed and those who are witnessing that situation.33 The latter was experienced by the authors of the project, when they were exposed to the public and were met with different and sometimes negative passerby reactions.

M. Banks, Materiały wizualne..., p. 128.

Ibidem.

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3.2. Self-invigilation – a project in progress of recording places and moments “Self-invigilation” was the internet project that tested the capabilities of the Instagram application (the supervisor of the project: Magdalena Kamińska).

A group of students cooperated in running an Instagram account. Each student moderated the account for for one week. The participants documented everyday activities, transitory moments which were important for them using mobile photographs. The account was not meant to create aesthetically meaningful images, though photographs respect the visual conventions of mobile photography as a good composition, an intimate viewpoint. The most important is the moment of transferring private content from a personal, mobile device into a public Instagram account. Students have to decide which image they want to display to others, which moment of their life they want to share.

The project is still growing and has many authors. The number of photographs are increasing. While photographing, students employ the aesthetic forms suggested by the editorial programmes installed in smartphones or inbuilt into Instagram. Paradoxically, due to this conventionalisation, the purpose of images are understandable for users and collaborators. Visual conventions work as communication codes for recipients.

Terence Wright distinguished two dimensions in photography: practice and theory. Practice contained the phase of pre-production selection and post-production editing. The first includes choices such as the choice of camera format, film stock, camera angle, viewpoint, editing contact sheet, etc. The second, theoretical dimension “examines the determinants of selection so that the photographer is able to make both the informed choice and efficient use of the medium to deliver the desired image while, at the same time, considering and reflecting upon his/her own social and cultural, temporal and spatial, location.”34 Do we deal with all those complicated conditions when we look at self-invigilation project? No doubt some of the conditions mentioned by Wright are not applicable in the case of the example analyzed. The choice of camera format is conditioned by the platform of presentation (Instagram) and the type of camera is reduced to digital photography taken with smartphones. However, other conditions such as the point of view or camera angle can be used. Also, when we consider the “theoretical” dimension of photography, we can say that the relationship between image and its context, the location and desired impression on viewers, is the core of the project.

T. Wright, The Photography Handbook, London – New York 1999, p. 7.

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3.3. Normals – observing the others The author, Magdalena Frąszczak carried out the research project “Celebrities and Normals. Nethnographic analysis of communication practices of users of Snapchat application.”35 The student was interested in the way people appear on social media. At least two theoretical frames can be used here to analyze the project. On one hand, in reference to Chalfen’s concept one can ask how people look in the eyes of others, how they appear to other. If, on the other hand, we apply Goffman’s concept presented in the seminal book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, we will receive a study of the social facade. The project is also an example of a study focused on images produced by web users. Frąszczak asks: Do we, in the world of social media, present our lives edited to look more absorbing? Are we thoroughly choosing those moments, we want to show the world to create a virtual identity? However, not entirely virtual, because we do not show imaginary picture there, we do not act as avatars. We display our face and surroundings. The commentaries are not anonymous as well as the “virtual hate.” We say something as ourselves, at the same time showing ourselves.36

The student used the content analyses towards visual production and visual possibilities of mobile media (like print screen), however, in order to interpret activities of the users, she had to employ a much broader concept of cultural studies, involving communication theories and identity concepts. There is an interesting feature to her approach – she often analyses images and verbal commentaries in real time, so she can treat written content as a conversation. It is possible due to the technological feature of the application itself. To document the action within Snapchat Frąszczak notices she has to use a screenshot procedure. The object of the analyses are, this time, mobile photographs themselves and the way they are used in the process of social interaction. Images sent with the help of the Snapchat application work mostly as triggers for awakening certain emotions between senders of images and their receivers.

The Snapchat invented originally as an extremely unstable application (images are sent to random users) soon was supplemented with tool that allows to archive the visual content. This indicates an attachment of users to the images they have created. We cannot decide whether we prefer images in constant flow or immobilized in visual archives.

The project by Magdalena Frąszczak under a supervision of Magdalena Kamińska.

The commentary to the project available at http://kulturymobilne.pl/szczegoly-aktyw nosci/?id=695&mainpicture=1 [1.06.2017].

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The three examples described above relate to various types of mobility: the first to physical action in the urban space, the second one – to share the intimate, personal experiences of bodily sensations in the virtual space, and finally the third to the need for self-presentation. Young researches focused on what is visible in order – paradoxically – to reveal what people do not admit.

Their research was to answer questions: how people behave in real space and how they treat visual media? How they want to be seen by others? Are they conscious of the results of activities they have taken on the web? Their search has proven that most users of visual mobile media are unaware of the effects of their actions. Even if they want to build a type of social facade, often this facade is interpreted be viewers quite the opposite to the creator’s intention. Students used visual methods: from video recording, through mobile photography to the analyses of visual contents. What advantages can one find in those approaches? First of all, the availability of research material allows the researcher to return to the recorded data and obtain further information from them. The issue of accessibility to digital data is particularly important in applications such a Snapchat, which requires additional action to capture images that disappear.

Researchers use either photographic documentation or screenshots here. It is possible thus to compare images from Snapchat to phenomena that happens in the physical world – they are the same temporary and have to be recorded.

Using a visual method gives another opportunity to provide insight into human experience expressed by an image, letting to consolidate varied points of sights and to build bridges between scientific disciplines.

Conclusion As I wrote in the introductory part of the article, my goal was to reflect on visual mobile technologies and to verify their practical use in the survey. Undoubtedly, nowadays it is almost impossible to ignore the role of visual aspects of life as well as to forget about technologies which are based on visuality: from design process to functions they enable. For scholars, who have to be aware both of the construction of technological visualities and their cultural meanings, the visual and technological literacy are both very important.

Let us conclude the article with a few pieces of advice of what we should remember while employing visual methods in the study of mobility.

1. We need a “scientific visual competence”37 which contains a knowledge about particular visual media (i.e. what is the difference between recording an event with a digital camera and still photography?).

37 L. Pauwels, Zwrot wizualny w badaniach i komunikacji wiedzy, transl. M. Frąckowiak, in M. Frąckowiak, K. Olechnicki (eds), Badania wizualne w działaniu, Warszawa 2011, p. 35.

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2. We have to consider the nature of the object of study and correlate its specifics with a choice of visual method (the analyses of found footage will require another tools than observation of a real space).

3. We should be conscious that visual material is primarily ambiguous, thus it is dependable on textual commentary (what we state in commentary to a certain extent decides on how an image will be interpreted).

4. The position and competence of the researcher should be taken into consideration (as in, do we know how to film?).

5. The ethical aspect of the visual field (do we have copyright for found material we interpret, or do we have permission from the photographed person to publish his/her image?).

6. The presumption of what could be a reaction for publication of visual material (i.e. when we are using the private archives obtained from individuals). Those few remarks indicate that visual material as well as visual tools are a vulnerable area and its use needs special attention from the scholar.

To finish, I would like to cite the words used by Paul Virilio at the very end of The Vision Machine. He recalled a famous discussion between iconoclasts and iconophils. He quoted the words of Nicephorus, who said: “If we remove the image, not only Christ but the whole universe disappears.”38 Even though, one may think about this kind of finale as a little pompous, we should find in those words validity of an argument. Especially now, the part of the universe we are living in is visual, we are moving by visible traces and we can touch visual universes we are carrying in our pockets. Even if something is “unseen,” it is also a reverse of visual surroundings and thinking we share.

Summary Visual Research in Motion: Between a Reflection on Visuality and Survey Practices The paper is devoted to the use of visual methods in the study of mobile phenomena.

The article has been divided into parts in which the following are analyzed in sequence: the state of the art in visual research methods (based on the conceptions of, among others, M. Banks, L. Pauwels and R. Chalfen); perception of movement and its recording using visual technologies (in reference to theories by R. Arnheim, P. Virilio, M. Villi and D. Keep); and in the final part three case studies based on research works completed by students of Institute of Cultural Studies of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań in 2015 and 2016. The first project is an analysis of behaviours of passers-by at street crossings, in the second one visual smartphone pictures are analysed and in the third P. Virilio, The Vision Machine…, p. 17.

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case nethnographic analysis are employed to look at the communication practices of Snapchat application users.

Keywords: visual methods, mobile technologies, visual representation, visual communication SĹ‚owa kluczowe: metody wizualne, technologie mobilne, reprezentacje wizualne, komunikacja wizualna

Ewa Wójtowicz University of Arts in Poznań

Seeing the Invisible.

The Emersion of Data in Post-Media Realities

This text is aimed at updating the cultural analysis of data visualisation by pointing to the particular quality of post-media mixed realities that is the invisibility (of data, processes and technical objects) and its emersion as a form of contradistinction. This particular quality may relate to the ubicomp paradigm, as well as to the invisibility of data, being sent and gathered by electronic mobile media, and the hidden, yet inevitable, technical infrastructure, that supports its circulation. The main field of relevance is going to integrate examples from various disciplines, such as: visual arts, architecture, data analysis and its visualisation, as well as “critical engineering.” I understand the notion of mixed realities (MR) according to the definition stating that there is a hybrid, somewhat tertiary space between the real life (RL) and an electronically augmented environment.1 Even though this description does not relate solely to audio-visual arts, it has been widely used as a starting point and discussed by many artists dealing with the issue since its emergence.2 However, the interplay between the real and the virtual, understood as an immersive experience, is not the case here; I am going to focus on rather “emersive” (to use the term proposed by Piotr Kubiński) artistic approaches pointing at the phenomenon of something once called mixed reality, in public space, both urban and natural.3 The emersion, as G. Youngblood, Virtual Space. The Electronic Environments of Mobile Image (excerpt), in T. Druckrey (ed.), Ars Electronica. Facing the Future, Cambridge, Mass. – London 1999, pp. 360365.

2 R.W. Kluszczyński, Sztuka interaktywna, Warszawa 2010, p. 203.

3 The ”emersion,” understood differently than originally, in astronomy, as a counterpart to ”immersion” is a term proposed and discussed by Piotr Kubiński in his doctoral thesis (2014).

See P. Kubiński, Gry wideo. Zarys poetyki, Kraków 2016; idem, Immersion vs. emersive effects 1

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discussed by Kubiński, is related to the poetics and aesthetics of video games, and is defined as “an experience of such elements of a game that weaken the impression of non-mediated participation in events presented in the game.”4 I suppose this useful category may be expanded onto the field of culture and gain a broader meaning when applied to audiovisual arts, in which the category of immersion has already a history. While immersion is a quality embedded in numerous artworks since the appearance of new media art, emersion is rather a feature that may be identified with the emergence of post-media art, including post-Internet art.

There have been numerous examples of such artistic activities pointing at the existence of an invisible layer between the realities (e.g. British collective The Blast Theory), widely discussed and analysed within the theoretical reflection on cyberculture and new media arts.5 It needs to be noted, though, that while the reflection on the subject is still valid, the definition of the subject itself is changing due to its particular relation with technology. Consequently, if mixed reality is technology dependant, so must be art dealing with the subject, as well as theory following it and attempting to grasp the crucial ideas and identify key issues. That is why a category of emersion might be helpful in keeping the mixed reality discourse still valid. Obviously, art not only applies evidently visual methods, but also sometimes abandons them for the sake of theory (Hito Steyerl) in order to avoid being accused of producing only shallow, visual attractiveness. This change of perspective enables – paradoxically – to see more, because the theoretical cognitive capacity is enhanced by critical interpretation that art implements by using both the visual and mobile methods in a natural way.

Therefore, I am going to present some artistic practices that give utterance to critical (re)construction of what is invisible, but essential in post-media reality. The proxemic, mutual relation between objects and places may be discovered by artistic activity that is aimed at materialising data (Unknown Fields Division) or interpretation of data based on current events (Forensic Architecture). For that reason, the outreach of data visualisation beyond graphic design, results in exposing the technical infrastructure – often unnoticed, but fundamental for keeping the illusion of virtual ubiquity (Timo Arnall, Evan Roth).

Questions enabled by artistic investigation are also aimed at the possibilities of scientific research of visual (big) data based on regularities and patterns (Julien Prévieux) and disclosing information by using the tactics of a “leak” (Julian Oliin videogames, in D. Stobbart, M. Evans (eds), Play, Theory, and Practice: Engaging with Videogames, Oxford 2014.

4 P. Kubiński, Emersja – antyiluzyjny wymiar gier wideo, “Nowe Media” 4/2014, p. 173.

5 P. Zawojski, Cyberkultura. Syntopia sztuki, nauki i technologii, Warszawa 2010, pp. 120123.

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ver) as well as so-called contamination of mainstream (visual) data circulation (Eva and Franco Mattes).

Artists seem to be interested in not only, so-called, architecture of information that supports the information “cloud” (Emma Charles, Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon) or urban spaces mapped by prototypes, developed within the field of speculative design (Superflux). They also formulate theoretical proposals that support their research, most notable by James Bridle in his concept of “New Aesthetics” powered by perceiving the physical reality with the criteria rooted in information reality, as well as Liam Young, representing the Unknown Fields Division collective. Nevertheless, there is also a surprisingly low-key approach that should be mentioned, as presented by Ross Birrell in his idea of slow travel between two important places on a map of European cultural heritage, Athens and Kassel, respectively.6 As a result, data are subjected to emersion; they become visible or hidden, mobile or inaccessible and blocked, as well as visualised, re-contextualised and re-purposed.

Regarding all the artistic attitudes and such a variety of examples, we need to ask: how can we understand mobility, the theoretical core research methods based on this feature and their practical application, still bearing in mind that we are discussing art and the results of such research are mostly going to be presented rather in a gallery (or more probable, online) than in a form of printed paper? Is it going to be a mobility of data, circulating between static server farms, cables and other infrastructure? Or is it going to be a mobility of a subject; if so, what kind of subject – an artist in her field study, or maybe another key figure of today’s socio-political landscape: a homeless migrant?

The complexity of issues resulting from even asking these questions makes this text rather a brief overview of case studies. Still it is not a methodological proposal or a deepened theoretical analysis that I later hope to develop this paper into, as a result of my further research. Looking at the way artists deal with mobile media, data architecture, cityscape and visual aspects of information, we can establish several attitudes represented in the chosen and presented examples. In my opinion, the critical approach is inevitable, as artists are always a social group with very little trust in official strategies and with a great interest for applying and testing tactics. Using the vocabulary taken from Michel de Certeau (1984), we can see that the mode of tactical approach is mostly based on making the unseen visible. Achieving this through artistic practices is different than producing an artwork as a cultural artefact, but rather engaging in a complex process.7 As a result, art is perceived here as a way of research, enabling to test some tactics, asking questions and starting from an idiosyncratic point The Athens-Kassel Ride, 2017, http://www.theathenskasselride.eu/ [27.05.2017].

M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. S.F. Rendall, Berkeley 2011.

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of view. This is particularly visible in the field of speculative design, which helps to challenge our already accepted wisdom with ideas and associations to let us think “outside the box.” Not only the artists mentioned above seem to be interested in these issues. One shall not forget about Hito Steyerl’s approach, her mobility between discourses: both artistic and philosophical, that lets her grasp the theoretical issues as well as working on them within her art practice.

Steyerl begins her article on the subject of data, interweaving the verbal argumentation with the visual one, from the sentence: “Not seeing anything intelligible is the new normal.” Therefore, she points at the same issues that James Bridle identifies, explaining that thanks to experiments with visibility of data and other “invisible” qualities, a surplus value is revealed: [...] something is enacted in that space which reveals something about the system itself. And that border can be at the border of technological systems, at the interface of things, it can be at the border of the nation states and it can also be in this continually contested thing, which is the border between us and our digital experiences.8

Both Steyerl and Bridle take for granted that we already live in a post-media reality, being overcharged with imagery and confused with fake news. The term “post-media” does not of course suggest that the media (both artistic and communication-based) are dead and gone, but rather that we think, perceive and act, being constantly shaped, influenced and even forced to do this or that by media. Particularly social media, which have also “emersed” in a way, and developed into a Social Operating System,9 as well as applications which lead to solutionism (criticised by Evgeny Morozov) and media of surveillance, capturing all forms of data. That’s why James Bridle, interviewed by Tactical Tech Collective, explicates the term “New Aesthetics” he had coined, to describe the postmedia ways of seeing. Bridle understands it basically as “talking about [things] through the lens of technology,”10 as a factor shaping our mindset prior to other agents and conditions. However, this way of thinking is not aimed at the examination of new technologies for the purpose of its newness, but rather using it as a tactical tool, “so technology becomes a way of making visible in itself the operations of politics in a number of ways.”11 Explaining the reasons for such an approach, Bridle says that: “Those who cannot perceive the network cannot act J. Bridle, Plane Talking, https://exposingtheinvisible.org/films/group/james-bridle/ [27.05.

2017].

9 Lev Manovich mentions Facebook as “Social OS,” replacing the former structures like MySpace in Software Takes Command (version 20.11.2008, p. 16), cf. L. Rainie, B. Wellman, Networked: The New Social Operating System, Cambridge, Mass. 2014.

10 Ibidem.

11 https://exposingtheinvisible.org/films/group/james-bridle/ [27.05.2017].

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effectively within it, and are powerless.”12 Now we should ask ourselves: how can we perceive it, what kind of abilities are necessary for that and what is the output of such a perception.

The answer can be found partly in several artistic approaches, such as the one by Timo Arnall, who explains that the impulse to start his research towards invisible data structures was that he “found it extraordinary that a technology that was defined as a proximity or ‘touch’-based interface, was so opaque in terms of its physical, spatial, gestural materiality.”13 Although, starting from even simpler ways of making things visible, we can point at the experiments by Evan Roth, who seems to be interested in virtual leftovers materialised. His visualisation of computer cache shows everything that passes through our computers, tablets and smartphones, that would otherwise passed by unnoticed. It is presented in a form of garbage, like in the installation Forgetting Spring (March to June 2013) or a form resembling a waterfall (Internet Cache Self Portrait Series, 2014), with all its material qualities.

In his recent projects, such as: Burial Ceremony, Total Internet Reflection (both 2015) and Kites & Websites (2016),14 Roth focuses on another quality that results from the invisibility of media: its unnoticed counterpart that is the technical infrastructure.15 To achieve his research goal, the artist travelled to some chosen “various submarine fibre optic cable landing locations all around the world: from the UK to Sweden and New Zealand.”16 Domenico Quaranta explains that it was like: [...] visiting the Internet physically [in] is an attempt to repair a relationship that has changed dramatically as the Internet becomes more centralized, monetized and a mechanism for global government spying. Through understanding and experiencing the Internet’s physicality, one comes to understand the network not as a mythical cloud, but as a human made and controlled system of wires and computers.17

Roth, however, found himself in the very same place, where the first transatlantic, intercontinental cable connecting Europe (Great Britain) and North America (The United States) has been commemorated in a form of a white 12 T. Arnall, The Immaterials Project, 4.09.2013, http://www.elasticspace.com/2013/09/ the-immaterials-project [27.05.2017].

13 Ibidem.

14 Domenico Quaranta explains that: “Kites are a reference to childhood innocence, but also to the history of communications: their hexagonal shape reminds the first patent drawing of the internet, and the hexagonal kites used by Guglielmo Marconi to send radio waves.” See D. Quaranta, Kites & Websites (online catalogue introduction), 2016, http://www.evan-roth. com/work/kites-and-websites/ [27.05.2017].

15 Ibidem.

16 Ibidem.

17 Ibidem.

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pyramid. Porthcurno in Cornwall is now the point, where a fibre optic cable descends into the ocean, making the data travel almost exactly the same way 150 years before.18 This type of cable has to be treated with caution, that’s why it is kept in a shape of “8” or a mathematical symbol of infinity: ∞. Evan Roth related to this shape in his installation Burial Ceremony (2015-2017) using a bundle of shiny, black, fibre optic cables shaped this way, which is natural for them.

With such an attitude, it is no wonder that Domenico Quaranta in his text for the catalogue, calls Roth “a Romantic wanderer” and compares his images to landscape painting. However, the media of representation Evan Roth uses are different from traditional academic media that were used by, for example, painters like William Turner or Caspar David Friedrich. The similarity is, first and foremost, in the attitude to landscape and the “slow” approach to travelling information.

Speaking on the physical being in the technology augmented world, and thus, being disciplined by the means of mobile media, we might think of consequences this (sometimes awkward) position has for a body of a human being and the way he/she moves around. I do not mean the face recognition here, although it is also quite important, but rather the whole visual alphabet of gestures, moves and other means of non-verbal communication, embedded in – for example – a posture of an individual human body. The idea of dystopian future based on the visibility of everyone and everything being tracked down (therefore turning an individual into a form of data) is present in activities of the speculative design collective, The Superflux Lab (Anab Jain and Jon Ardern).

In their project Drone Aviary (2015), they create a vision of (supposedly near) future cities patrolled by drones with face recognition abilities and more privacy-threatening features. In the artists’ proposal, there are several types of drones, such as: “The Flying Billboard” (an advertising drone), “Newsbreaker, the Media Drone,” “Nightwatchman, the Surveillance Drone,” “RouteHawk, Traffic Management Assistant” and the smallest “FlyCam Instadrone.” They seem to be operating in the space of British cities, as a familiar and naturalised part of an urban cityscape, as much as CCTV cameras or traffic lights. Theorising such attempts, American scholar, Benjamin H. Bratton noticed that: “Speculative Design (SD) understands itself as progressive alternative perspective to much of mainstream Design culture (and as an alternative to other alternatives as well)”19 and therefore he writes about the two ways of expression through design: the project and the model.20 The first connection was established in 1866.

B.H. Bratton, On Speculative Design, “DIS Magazine,” 2016, http://dismagazine.com/ discussion/81971/on-speculative-design-benjamin-h-bratton/ [27.05.2017].

20 Ibidem.

18 19

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Another, more conceptual and universal vision of measuring and searching for regularities and patterns is presented in the project Patterns of Life (2015)

by French artist Julien Prévieux. Various forms of scientific approach to human and animal behaviour, movements of an individual or a group (of fish) forming a shoal, optometry and big data harvesting – all makes this project very prolific in its possible interpretations. There are movements that have their origin in nature (a school of fish) or in culture (a ballet dancer or a clerk by his machine, repeating his mundane actions). As we can read, the project: [...] deals with the ways in which movements have been recorded and measured since the photographs which visualised human motion in the late 19th century, with the help of points of light that were attached to the body. In six different settings, five dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet execute choreographies starting from protocols and scientific results, while a voice-over alludes to the economic, military and political context of each experience.21

This attempt reminds us of course of 19th century scientists, who were trying to measure human body movements in space, in search for regularities, using photography and placing their models either on a background with a grid or making them wear costumes with joints and bones represented by white marks. Étienne-Jules Marey or Eadweard Muybridge, were experimenting in the field of science, but their results were later – kind of – naturalised in the field of arts, being associated with such famous artworks like Nude Descending the Staircase by Marcel Duchamp.

I have particular reasons to recall Duchamp at this point, because, Prévieux had an earlier, equally interesting project: What Shall We Do Next? (Sequence #2) (2014), for which he was awarded with the Marcel Duchamp Art Award 2014. In this project, using the movements of a group of dancers, Prévieux researched the set of gestures that are under patent control. Those “deposited gestures” as the artist calls them, were attempted to be patented in the USA by global companies, therefore they also get a particular meaning, resulting in a certain discipline we are subjected to. This is of course a form of speculative thinking, asking questions about how our body movements might look like in the future, since these movements are used to enable functions on devices and are legally registered even before they do exist. Prévieux also states that human bodies have been “shaped” by using technologies, for example certain interfaces causing physical pain when used too long or other requiring special abilities to be learned and exercised. Speaking of this project, I cannot (help) but think of Edward Shanken, who was writing about Jack Burnham’s theory from Systems Aesthetics (1968) reminding that: “Echoing McLuhan’s description of https://www.operadeparis.fr/en/3e-scene/patterns-of-life [27.05.2017].

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art as a ‘distant early warning system,’ Burnham wrote, ‘Art [...] may be a means for preparing man for physical and mental changes which he will in time make upon himself.’”22 If art understood from the perspective of speculative design is supposed to tell us something about futures, there might be a multitude of them: a social future, a historical future, a technical future and even a geological future, and last, but not least, a kind of ecological future as well. This is expressed by Benjamin H. Bratton, who, on the other hand, in his article published in the “DIS Magazine” notices that: “translation of new materials into a new program for social and ecological organisation should mobilise the sometimes overly self-referential Arts and Humanities toward new outward-facing feats of abstraction, imagination and rationalisation.”23 Following this we might think of speculative design as a form of visual method, providing models to be discussed and prototypes to be verified in action.

It is now necessary to go back to art and let the artists speak for themselves.

So, when James Bridle speaks about “exposing the invisible” by asking: Why is this thing that’s obviously under discussion – why has it remained invisible to me for such a long time? Because that immediately opens up, the politics, not just of the image-making, but of everything that’s produced it. Because we live a society that’s inundated with imagery. That everything is imaged and so much imagery is immediately accessible to us, if not forced upon us. So spotting where imagery has been removed, where there are gaps in that image-making, is a way of finding out what is being hidden, what’s being avoided, or what’s not being said.

Because we live in a state where if something is not being visualised, there’s usually a reason for that because everything is visualised almost by default now.24

Bridle explains his interest in making physical objects, such as diagrams, books and site-specific installations out of data that: [...] taking the data and giving it a physical form activates a fairly solid bit of the human brain that’s capable of measuring physical stuff. So, if you want to talk about the volume of something intangible, the easiest way to do that is to make it tangible and kind of addressable.25

That is probably the reason why exposing the emersive technical infrastructure is a point of interest of many artists, filming the places where servers work, searching for cable routes and visualising the wi-fi networks that our mobile devices log into. Like Emma Charles in her Fragments on Machines 2013, filming 22 E.A. Shanken, Historicizing Art and Technology: Forging a Method and Firing a Canon, in O. Grau (ed.), Media Art Histories, London 2007, p. 44.

23 B. H. Bratton, On Speculative Design...

24 J. Bridle, The Role of the Visual, https://exposingtheinvisible.org/films/the-role-of-thevisual/ [27.05.2017].

25 Ibidem.

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a Lower Manhattan underground location dedicated to the hidden, yet complex infrastructure.26 Or revealing the architecture of information which supports the information “cloud” by fantasizing about its possible futures in the project World Brain (2015) by Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon. Both projects

by Charles and Degoutin/Wagon, included in the exhibition Nervous Systems.

Quantified Life and the Social Question (2016),27 take the form of video essays with narrations, as well as Timo Arnall’s work Robot Readable World (2012).

Using images of visual systems created for the purpose of data analysis, Arnall seems to be asking: how robots and other artificially intelligent, programmed machines, actually see the world and are they capable of making sense out of what they see? These processed found-footage images28 may remind us of Harun Farocki’s earlier experiments with filming and contextualising a mediatised gaze. However, as Arnall underlines: The Robot-Readable World is pre-Cambrian at the moment, but machine vision is becoming a design material alongside metals, plastics and immaterials. It’s something we need to develop understandings and approaches to, as we begin to design, build and shape the senses of our new artificial companions.29

That is also why Timo Arnall, an artist who has a PhD in interactive design, pays a lot of attention to “the phenomena and mechanisms of technological infrastructures through visual, photographic, narrative, animated and cinematic techniques.”30 In his Immaterials series, he developed the project Ghosts in the Field (2013)31 in which he used Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technique.

It, basically, “uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects”32 and as such is used in microchips that animals may have implanted under their skin. Using one of the items we use every day as com A similar attitude is visible in an illustrated guide published by Ingrid Burrington, an artist, who is decoding the technical infrastructures in her book Networks of New York, New York 2016.

27 Nervous Systems. Quantified Life and the Social Question, HKW Berlin 11.03-09.05.2016.

Curated by Stephanie Hankey, Marek Tuszynski and Anselm Franke from the Tactical Tech Collective.

28 T. Arnall, Robot Readable World. The film, Berg, Post #6258, 6.02.2012, http://berg london.com/blog/2012/02/06/robot-readable-world-the-film. “This film uses found-footage from computer vision research to explore how machines are making sense of the world.

And from a very high-level and non-expert viewing, it seems very true that machines have a tiny, fractional view of our environment, that sometimes echoes our own human vision, and sometimes doesn’t” [27.05.2017].

29 http://berglondon.com/blog/2012/02/06/robot-readable-world-the-film/ [27.05.2017].

30 T. Arnall, The Immaterials...

31 T. Arnall, Immaterials: The Ghost in the Field, 12.10.2009, https://vimeo.com/7022707 [27.05.2017].

32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-frequency_identification [27.05.2017].

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muters, that is – in the case of London – the Oyster card – Arnall exposed the way it emits waves using a RFID reader and long exposure photography. So, as the artist explains: he Immaterials project is concerned with the increasing invisibility of interfaces and infrastructures [...] I demonstrate and analyse how this research addresses the inter-related issues of invisibility, seamlessness and materiality that have become central issues in the design of contemporary interfaces.33

This is not the only example of Arnall’s interest in visualising data. One of his earlier projects was Wireless in the World (2010), in which he examined the idea of visualising the Wi-Fi signals in the urban space and, generally, in everyday life. As one of the examples of speculative design, it lacked a critical perspective though, which is now inevitable, when we think about visualising informational space in post-Snowden times. Reaching again to Timo Arnall’s portfolio, we can find another example, which is also more recent one, a project focused on socalled information architecture. As the artist explains on his website: “Internet machine is a multi-screen film about the invisible infrastructures of the internet.

The film reveals the hidden materiality of our data by exploring some of the machines through which ‘the cloud’ is transmitted and transformed.”34 Sometimes, though the visualisation of data takes form of an almost kinetic installation, like An Internet (2015) by Jeroen van Loon. The construction made of glass pipes emitting white steam, resembles the system of intercontinental cables that the whole network relies on. The white haze, emitted from time to time, resembles the data that is not going to be archived, but will be deleted permanently. However, while such works are rather neutral in their socio-political attitude, there are artists who, starting from data analysis, get closer to citizen journalism or even a form of political activism.

This doesn’t necessarily have to be a straightforward counterculture (this one, as Holland Cotter, “The New York Times” art critic notices, writing about Laura Poitras’s art is long gone), but rather more sophisticated attitude. It is evident in the materialisation of leftovers of a different kind, created by Unknown Fields Division, a group of artists and architects who call themselves “a nomadic design research studio.” They have developed a project, Rare Earthenware (2015), based on their field trip to the Inner Mongolia province of China, where they have been exploring a toxic lake, created as a result of mining. The substance obtained as a result of such an output is used to produce electronics, including mobile phones and computers. Samples of the black, toxic and ra33 T. Arnall, Making Visible. Mediating the material of emerging technology (PhD thesis), The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, 2013, http://www.elasticspace.com/downloads/ Making_Visible_Timo_Arnall_2014.pdf [27.05.2017].

34 http://www.elasticspace.com/2014/05/internet-machine [27.05.2017].

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dioactive mud35 have been taken back to England and used to create objects in the shape of vases, that have been later exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as a part of the exhibition What is a Luxury? (2015): The finished vases are sized in relation to the amount of waste created in the production of three items of technology that use rare earth – a smartphone, a featherweight laptop and the cell of a smart car battery.36

This raises questions about the real price of a luxurious item that is, among others, the environmental catastrophe.

Data interpretation based on current events of a different kind is conducted by Forensic Architecture who comprise “a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, that undertakes advanced architectural and media research.”37 They are, for example interested in drone strikes and places like Gaza, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and so on. The collective website explains that since: “Urban [battlefields] have become dense data and media environments, generating information that is shared on social and mainstream media.”38 In one of their data-driven projects, they focus on the issue of immigrants, striving to cross the Mediterranean Sea in overcrowded boats. This project was recently included in the exhibition Making Use. Life in Post-artistic times in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.39 As we can learn from the interactive guide provided by the exhibition curators, Kuba Szreder and Sebastian Cichocki, “Forensic Architecture’s investigations have provided evidence for international prosecution teams, political organisations, and the United Nations.”40 This particular study is developed on the case of “the deaths of sixty-three migrants left to drift on board a small boat for fourteen days in the central Mediterranean Sea, at a time in which the region was being actively monitored by the NATO-led coalition intervening in Libya.”41 Here, the input data comprises various sets of information, that is not only visualised in the form of a movie but also supported by subtitles that explain what we actually see.

The same interest in drones operating in dangerous, inaccessible, remote places takes place in the works of the aforementioned Laura Poitras, the cru35 T. Smith, Rare Earthenware: a journey to the toxic source of luxury goods, “The Guardian,” 15.04.2015, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2015/apr/15/rare-earthenware-a-journey-to-the-toxic-source-of-luxury-goods [27.05.2017].

36 Ibidem.

37 E. Weizman, Introduction: Forensis, pp. 9-32, http://www.forensic-architecture.org/pro ject/ [27.05.2017].

38 Ibidem.

39 S. Cichocki, K. Szreder, Making Use. Life in Post-artistic Times, curatorial statement, 2016, http://artmuseum.pl/en/wystawy/robiac-uzytek [27.05.2017].

40 http://makinguse.artmuseum.pl/en/forensic-architecture/ [27.05.2017].

41 Ibidem.

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sading journalist, as Sarah Lyall from “New York Times” refers to her as.42 Poitras, famous for one of the very first interviews with Edward Snowden and the director of the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour that brought her many issues, as well as an artist concerned about the intricacies of American political history. Her exhibition Astro Noise (2016)43 in New York’s Whitney Museum shows, among others, an installation of Bed Down Location (2016). As Holland Cotter notices: There, we learn that we’ve been subjects of surveillance throughout our visit. Our presence in Bed Down Location was electronically spied on and monitored. An infrared camera embedded in the gallery ceiling sends real-time images of all visiting stargazers and drone-spotters to a monitor in the show’s last room. We also discover that whatever electronic devices we’re carrying have been detected and recorded: We see coded references to them scrolling down a video screen.44

This kind of data capture and sousveillance art (or maybe we should say whistle-blowers’ art) may be visible in another example, that is art and so-called critical engineering by Julian Oliver, a New Zealander living and working in Berlin, as well as Poitras, actually. Julian Oliver is a member of the Berlin-based collective Critical Engineers (together with Daniil Vasiliev and Gordan Savičić).

In their manifesto they state: “The Critical Engineer expands ‘machine’ to describe interrelationships encompassing devices, bodies, agents, forces and networks.”45 In case of PRISM: The Beacon Frame (2013), a project Oliver developed with Vasiliev, they created a device that: [...] is a speculative, functional response to the general absence of information as to what NSA PRISM equipment actually looks like. Centered with the image of the prism, the project seeks to provide public direct contact with the aesthetics, technology and strategies used by states against their publics (and others), retained from critical contact by an opaque and coveted surveillance culture.46

S. Lyall, Laura Poitras Prepares ‘Astro Noise’ for the Whitney Museum, “The New York Times,” 27.01.2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/arts/design/laura-poitras-prepa res-astro-noise-for-the-whitney-museum.html [27.05.2017].

43 Information on The Whitney Museum Website, http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/Laura Poitras [27.05.2017].

44 H. Cotter, ‘Laura Poitras: Astro Noise’ Examines Surveillance and the New Normal, “The New York Times,” 4.02.2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/arts/design/laura-poitrasastro-noise-examines-surveillance-and-the-new-normal.html [27.05.2017].

45 J. Oliver, G. Savičić, D. Vasiliev, The Critical Engineering Manifesto 2011-2017, https:// criticalengineering.org/ [27.05.2017].

46 The project had its debut during ArtHackDay Berlin, September 2013, designed by J. Oliver and D. Vasiliev. It was further developed for the Transmediale 2014. J. Oliver, PRISM: The Beacon Frame, 7.02.2014, https://julianoliver.com/output/the-beacon-frame [27.05.2017].

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What happened during Transmediale14 and resulted in taking down the project due to protests of hacked phones owners, was that the private data was, actually, stolen and made public. The paradox is, that while the same procedure takes place with the regular smartphone usage, the phone owners are less likely to protest. That’s why the disclosure of information by using the tactics of “a leak” or even a “detonation” (to quote the phrase Oliver used from his other work, Transparency Grenade, based on making data visible) is so intriguing in this project.

Yet another way of dealing with “leaking” data was a project by Eva and Franco Mattes Fukushima Texture Pack (2015), a project based on turning some specimens from a field trip into open access visual samples. These specimens are not neutral, though, as we can guess even from the title of the project. The artists had taken part in the initiative Don’t Follow the Wind, resulting in the joint exhibition that took place in Fukushima, as a form of an intervention in the Exclusion Zone.47 The actual result of the exhibition is inaccessible, due to the fact that the zone is closed both to its former inhabitants and potential visitors since the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster in March 2011.

However, the photographs of different surfaces that the artists have taken in the contaminated zone, have been made available online for free, as so-called “textures.”48 The images show seemingly neutral surfaces of roads, buildings, walls, tatami mats and so on. The files may be used as backgrounds for images, wallpapers or printed on canvas, as it happened, when the project was exhibited during the “Fast Forward Festival 4” in Athens (2017).49 The heterotopic associations taking place between the actual locations the images come from and their repurposing, remind the viewer of the remote and dangerous zones they “emerse” from. The more the visual data (here: surfaces from Fukushima) circulate, the better we understand the dramatic impact of an image that may look neutral at first sight.

The last, but not least, importance of the invisible factor was recalled as early as in 1977 by Marshall McLuhan, who warned that: 47 The project involved 12 artists, including Eva and Franco Mattes, Trevor Paglen and Ai Weiwei, as well as the Japanese Chim↑Pom collective, who were the initiators of the project.

Apart from the interventions in Fukushima, the exhibition is being connected with some other events all over the world, always making a heterotopia-like connection to the main point of origin.

48 This sort of images is widely available in image data banks, used for graphic design and postproduction.

49 The exhibition Don’t Follow the Wind within this festival was arranged in the, once luxurious, Acropol Hotel in Athens abandoned in 2011, which makes a coincidence to Fukushima zone. The hotel, turned into Non-Visitor Center for the purpose of the exhibition, hosted several installations. In some rooms on the 3rd floor there were beds covered with textiles printed with the textures coming from the Fukushima photographed surfaces.

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The hidden aspect of the media are the things that [...] have an irresistible force when invisible. When these factors are ignored, remain invisible, they have an absolute power over the user.50

That is why the invisible is so meaningful in the post-media reality, which is infoxicated and overflowed with images. Art offers some tools to look at important issues and provides modes of searching for – if not solving, then at least exposing – the emergent problems. Summarising, we might recall James Bridle again: This may be a wild artistic hope, but I think that it possibly exists beyond this opacity-transparency binary, [...] for me, the internet is trying to kind of show us by making this stuff visible but not necessarily capturable.51

Therefore, if there are modes of approach aiming at capturing the essence of the invisible, the process of noticing the emersion of data, signals and patterns is one of the first steps on this way.

Summary Seeing the Invisible.

The Emersion of Data in Post-Media Realities The text is aimed at updating the cultural analysis of data visualisation by pointing at the particular quality of post-media mixed realities that is the invisibility and emersion as its contradistinction. This particular quality may mean as well the invisibility of data, being sent and gathered by electronic mobile media, and the hidden, yet inevitable, technical infrastructure, that supports its circulation. The main field of relevance is going to integrate examples from various disciplines, that are: visual arts, architecture, data analysis and its visualisation as well as “critical engineering.” Exposing the emersive technical infrastructure (data architecture) and the invisible is a point of interest of many artists, who participate in the critical debate on the subject of post-media environments, with their artistic statements.

Keywords: mixed reality, post-media art, data infrastructure, architecture of information, visibility Słowa kluczowe: mieszana rzeczywistość, sztuka postmedialna, infrastruktura danych, architektura informacji, widzialność

50 M. McLuhan, The Medium Is the Message, lecture, ABC Television, 27.07.1977, quoted

by O. Lialina, Not Art & Tech, in R. Bishop, K. Gansing, J. Parikka, E. Wilk (eds), Across & beyond – A transmediale Reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts and Institutions, Berlin 2016, p. 139.

51 https://exposingtheinvisible.org/films/group/james-bridle/ [27.05.2017].

Mobile cultural practices

Agnieszka Dytman-Stasieńko University of Lower Silesia in Wrocław Department of Journalism, Communication and Media Technology

Mobile Infoactivism – Development, Typology, Technological Contexts

Introduction The presence of mobile technologies, phones, tablets, laptops in the various contexts of human life appears so obvious that it is hardly noticed. They are used both in private and professional life, in social and political activities. This paper will thus focus on the utilization of mobile technologies in activist undertakings and outline the concept of infoactivism, discussing it in detail from the mobility standpoint, i.e. various applications of mobile technologies in information activism.

There can be no doubt that digital devices, mobile ones in particular, make a major contribution to the development of infoactivism, which I construe as activism whose subject and object is information: its release, dissemination or protection in restrictive information regimes, with a view to effecting a mental, political, social or economic change. Infoactivism encompasses numerous undertakings to facilitate an unconstrained flow of information.1

1. Mobile infoactivism in a diachronic perspective The mobility of infoactivism, now taken for granted, evolved together with advances in technology. The range of possibilities and consequently modes of using mobile media has continually expanded. It is therefore worthwhile to I discuss the concept of infoactivism in greater detail in Info-activism: The egalitarisation of access to information, in K. Konarska, A. Szynol (eds), Media and Journalism in the Digital Era, Wrocław 2016, pp. 119-130.

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take a look at the evolution of mobile infoactivism in a diachronic perspective, though it has to be set first against a broader background of transformations which affected the organization of collective action. This is due to the fact that the evolution of the media, from analog press and radio, through web pages to mobile and social media is not without an impact on the morphology of protest.

Communication technologies are not a neutral and passive medium, exerting a substantial influence on organization and practice of activist undertakings, being a vital factor of change in that domain.

Stefania Milan names three macrotrends in organizing collective action that may be identified in the period beginning in the 1960s, when new social movements emerged in the Western world. Each of those is a resultant of access to communication resources and organizational forms supported by a particular kind of media technology.

Most groups classified as part of the first trend developed in the 1960s, relying on a strong sense of identity and belonging. Leaders of the new social movements would manage key assets (e.g. funds), direct the actions of the members, and monopolize cultural output. Mobilization actions were supported by self-organizing media, mainly by press and radio.

The spread of the internet in the mid-1990s brought about a radical change in how resistance activities functioned. A webpage became a foundation and a metaphor of new forms of action, which on the one hand reduced costs of action and mobilization, but on the other undermined the specific stability and identity of movements, favouring the so-called affinity groups: short-lived, action-oriented and, unlike its predecessors, allowing for multiple, flexible identities. These informal networks are characterized by fluctuating and horizontal leadership. Major forms of protest included vociferous demonstrations in the name of global fairness or actions against various multilateral summits.2 The internet provided the chief media support, as it gave advantage to grassroots digital media which became the main source of normative and cultural content.

Activists were able to create and develop their narratives online, bypassing mainstream media and thus overcoming the symbolic power held previously only by resource-rich organizations.3 The third phase began with the expansion of mobile and social media, which became the pillar of a new wave of protests where the focus was on the networked individual. The Arab Spring, the Indignados, the Occupy movement saw a revolutionary tide hitting various parts of the world. Social and mobile media were at the core of mediatic activity, changing how the protests functioned. Mobile media (no longer just phones serving solely as a channel L. Lievrouw, Media alternatywne i zaangażowanie społeczne, transl. M. Klimowicz, Warszawa 2012, pp. 212-213.

3 Such as Indymedia, ibidem, pp. 152-188.

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for communication) – portable, always switched on, complementary to faceto-face communication, personal and simultaneously personalized – but, quite importantly, proprietary and centralized as well. Mobile media enable one to integrate political activity into the private, everyday sphere, making the protest accessible via their phone.4 Resistance ceased to be a separate and exclusive phenomenon thanks to inclusive mobile media.

At this point, it may be worthwhile to discuss the development of mobile technologies in activist undertakings in greater detail, especially with regard to other media, considering initial coexistence, when webpage-based activism predominated, and further milestones that mark the rise of mobile media over older technologies, which they supplemented, replaced or thoroughly subordinated.

The beginnings of digital mobile infoactivism coincides with the period when the internet page became the principal medium of action, i.e. in the mid1990s which witnessed the insurgence of the Zapatistas.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by the US, Canada and Mexico, came into force on January 1st, 1994. On the same day, the Zapatistas of Mexico started an uprising directed – among other things – against the importation of cheap maize from the US. Several thousand poorly armed insurgents seized the control over main cities of Chiapas and 500 ranches; the speaker for the movement, subcomandante Marcos, ascended the balcony of the city hall of San Cristóbal de las Casas, to announce the beginning of the revolution from, which later would be named, the first post-modern revolution.5 Although the cities were held only for several hours, the uprising against the government of Mexico to defend the native population garnered international attention. Skilful use of technology enabled the often illiterate farmers of Chiapas to gain support around the world and resulted in talks with the government.

The Zapatistas realized that they were unable to win using traditional weapons, which is why they resorted to communication technologies: laptops or mobile phones. Subcomandante Marcos, always in a black balaclava, sporting a pipe and a walkie-talkie became the face of the movement. On the many pages devoted to the Zapatistas, Marcos was depicted in something of a cyberpunk fashion: balaclava’ed, with a headset, as well as a satellite and a grid indicating connection in the background. In practice, Marcos’ adage Our Words are Our

S. Milan, When Algorithms Shape Collective Action: Social Media and the Dynamics of Cloud Protesting, “Social Media + Society,” 31.12.2015, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ full/10.1177/2056305115622481 [25.03.2018].

5 A. Carigan, Chiapas: the First Post-Modern Rewolution, ”The Fletcher Forum” 19(1)/1995, http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/forwa19&div=12&id=&page= [25.03.2018].

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Weapon6 not only meant an armed struggle (unequal as it was) with the government forces, but also a fight to be noted in the global stream of information.

Since the very outbreak of the revolution, the internet was flooded with e-mails and communications sent by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).

As Harry Cleaver underlines, the role of the internet evolved, relying initially on the earlier sites of information exchange, created as a means of mediatic support for the resistance against NAFTA or focusing on Latin America and affairs of the indigenous people. The sites had already had an international profile before the revolution, but they were present mainly in North America and Western Europe. Soon, however, there would be specialized listings and webpages dedicated exclusively to Chiapas. It needs to be stressed that EZLN had little if any agency in those undertakings as they owed to the contribution of the international support network. The people of Chiapas not only lacked access to computers, as electricity and landlines were in short supply as well. The communications from the EZLN were not created online but written for the media and handed over to reporters and friends who would pass them on further. The materials were only copied or scanned for online distribution.7 The EZLN had no laptops, internet access, faxes or mobile phones; the technology was nevertheless available to transnational and Mexican NGOs, which participated in the support network of the Zapatistas. Their representatives came to Mexico City and San Cristóbal de las Casas (where mobile coverage was available), joined forces with the local non-governmental bodies and, as emphasized by the authors of The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico, effectively took advantage of communication technologies in the fight for global attention: the internet, mobile phones and fax machines.8 Importantly enough, pro-Zapatista mobilization spanned five continents as a result, inspiring people in numerous countries to decisive resistance.9 These beginnings of the mobility of activism remain utterly unnoticed for several reasons. First of all, the Zapatistas became notorious thanks to the internet and related research concentrates – quite reasonably – on that technological aspect, since it provided the main channel of information flow. After all, the 1990s mark the rise of the internet site as a medium exploited by activists.

The pre-smartphone era mobiles in their traditional configuration, whose chief function was to enable information transfer, were not as attractive and visible Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Our Words are our Weapon: Selecting Writings, New York – London – Sydney – Toronto 2001.

7 H. Cleaver, The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric, “Journal of International Affairs” 2/1998, p. 628, https://libcom.org/files/Cleaver%20 %20The%20Zapatista%20Effect%20%20The%20Internet%20and%20the%20Rise%20of%20 an%20Alternative%20Political%20Fabric.pdf [25.03.2018].

8 D. Ronfeldt, J. Arquilla, G.E. Fuller, M. Fuller, The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico, Santa Monica 1998, p. 50.

9 H. Cleaver, The Zapatista Effect..., p. 622.

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a medium, being just an unnoticed go-between, conveying information to the target medium rather than the target medium itself. True mobile activism was yet to come.

Still, mobile media in the context of the Zapatistas and their networked protest should not be lost from sight, as only several years later, in 1999, when ca.

50,000 anti- and alterglobalists demonstrating in Seattle blocked the meeting of the WTO delegates, mobile media proved an invaluable mode of communication. It is often underlined that the cohesion of activities of the Direct Action Network10 owed largely to efficiency of communication and a network based on mobile phones, radios, police scanners and portable computers. The protesters, equipped with wireless PDAs (PalmPilots) were able to update webpages in real time, reporting directly from the scene, police scanners warned them of changes in police tactics, while mobile phones were used to communicate during protests and coordinate the latter.11 The activists were successful because they took advantage of the element of surprise consisting in the effective use of mobile technologies to liaise between various groups of protesters.

The strength of mobile activism was confirmed by the 2001 mass protests in the Philippines, which toppled the government of President Joseph Estrada.

Tens of thousands of Manila’s residents gathered in Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (known as Edsa) within an hour from the moment the first text message was sent: “Go 2EDSA, Wear black.” Over the next four days, over a million others joined the demonstration, most dressed in black. Howard Rheinghold observes that this was how the legend of the Generation Txt was born.12 Subsequent years validate the effectiveness of mobile devices in organizing political action. In 2004, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, hundreds of thousands protested against election fraud. The organization of protests relied to a great extent on the internet and mobile phones. It may be noted, however, that in the latter half of 2004 only 2-4% of the population in Ukraine had access to the internet, therefore the complex strategy involving online communication presupposed a two-tier flow of information. A limited number of net users – activists, independent journalists, students, human rights campaigners – provided a channel to convey independent news available online, but otherwise inaccessible to most Ukrainians. Also, the use of mobile phones was important due to limited access to internet resources. They were extensively exploited by activists, who formed 150 mobile groups for the elections, tasked with disseminating information and monitoring the ballots in collaboration with 72 regional 10 Direct Action Network was established in summer 1999, and gathered anti-corporate, anti-establishment, anarchist and similar movements.

11 M.T. Ntobi, Violent Class Struggles and The Need for Revolutionary Change: Anti-WTO organized Labor Protest vs Seattle Police, Raleigh 2016, p. 291.

12 H. Rheinghold, Smart Mobs. The Next Social Revolution, London 2002, pp. 157-158.

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centres. Mobile phones were indeed the basic tool of those “flying squads” in the course of the elections and later protests.13 The year 2009 witnessed the first Twitter revolution break out in Moldova.14 In April, mass demonstrations took place in Chisinau, after the victory of Communists in the parliamentary elections had been announced. Called upon by Hyde Park and ThinkMoldova groups, 15,000 young people took to the streets of the capital. That prompt and widespread mobilization was feasible thanks to skilful use of communication technologies, as information was disseminated via e-mails, text messages, social media and blogs. Mobile media also served to document the protest of which no report could be found in the governmentcontrolled news outlets. The protesters uploaded videos from the demonstration and reported on the events online in real time.

Much the same happened in Iran, where mass protests took place in 2009 in the wake of rigged presidential elections. The fear of the strength of the mobile media in organizing resistance had its brutal aftermath. Faced with growing discontent and popular outrage, the authorities blocked text messaging and phone calls. Despite that, demonstrations were staged in 20 venues in Tehran; the participants carried banners saying e.g. “The Liar is a Traitor and the Traitor is fearful cuts off SMS.” Social media, such as Twitter, Facebook or YouTube, became the main channels of information, ensured the protesters in Iran a transnational audience, while camera-equipped smartphones again served to document the protest. The fact that Iranian authorities decided to disable mobile forms of communication reflected the potential of mobile media in resistance actions, and the bitter awareness of that strength on the part of the government.15 Then followed the culmination of protests, the Arab Spring of 2011, sparked by the self-immolation of a frustrated street vendor who had been humiliated and beaten by the security in a sequence of offices to which he asked for the cancellation of a small financial penalty. Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on December 17th, 2010. Upon his death on January 4th, 2011, Tunisia was swept with a wave of protests, because the news of his act spread rapidly in social media that were accessed mainly via phones. Criticism of the government and the president, which thus far had been taking place in the virtual world, spilled not only onto the streets of Tunisia; protests against oppressive, authoritarian rule J. Goldstein, The Role of Digital Networked Technologies in The Ukrainian Orange Revolution, Internet and Democracy. Case Study Series, Harvard 2007, https://cyber.harvard.edu/ sites/cyber.harvard.edu/files/Goldstein_Ukraine_2007.pdf [25.11.2017].

14 Christensen underscores that the catchphrase “Twitter revolution” was coined within the mainstream media. See Ch. Christensen, Iran: Networked Dissent?, “CounterPunch” 2.07.2009, https://www.counterpunch.org/2009/07/02/iran-networked-dissent/ [25.11.2017].

15 E. Gheytanchi, Symbol, Signs and Slogans of the Demonstration in Iran, in Y.R Kamalipour (ed.), Media, Power and Politics in the Digital Age: The 2009 Presidential Election Uprising in Iran, Lanham 2010, pp. 254-255.

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flared up throughout the region: in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Yemen and other countries. When the governments blocked available communication pathways, such as social media and the internet, mobile phones came to aid. News were spread and protests coordinated despite suspended internet service.

Mobile and social media turned out to be the key technologies for the involved activists, also in the Western world; the Indignados or the Occupy movement depended considerably on the new communication technologies, mobile media in particular. In Poland, the power of social and mobile media was evinced in the Black Protest (or Black Protests) of October 3rd, 2016, organized to oppose the attempts to introduce stricter anti-abortion laws. The participants and the organizers of the rallies and marches emphasize that social media (often accessed via mobile devices), especially Facebook, made it possible to build an emotional community, coordinate actions and ultimately demonstrate in the streets of many cities, beyond Poland as well.16 Mediatization has become a major trait of protests, which are no longer approached as isolated instances of resistance but as a multilateral process driven by direct participants who are technologically supported by international groups of activists and a transnational audience. Participation of the latter is admittedly mediated, but it occurs in real time, hence they are both witnesses and give support to those involved in the struggle.

The above timeline of mobile activism demonstrates a diachronic evolution that is partly due to the development of the technology itself. The mobile media which once served only to exchange information (as during the insurgence of the Zapatistas, for example) have subsequently expanded its range of capabilities, ensuring not only simple communication, but also means of documenting protests, becoming an effective alternative to technologies whose use was blocked by regimes. Such obstacles were successfully overcome, therefore their efficacy can hardly be disputed.

2. Typology of mobile actions – mobile infoactivism in a synchronic perspective It follows from the above that – from a diachronic standpoint – a number of major macrotrends in the organization of collective action may be distinguished, with the last phase encompassing actions using mobile technologies (which K. Murawska, Z. Włodarczyk, Nam się zaczęło pod dupą palić… Czarny protest w perspektywie organizatorek, Warsaw 2017, http://krytykapolityczna.pl/file/sites/4/2017/09/Namsi%C4%99-zacz%C4%99%C5%82o-pod-dup%C4%85-pali%C4%87_Murawska_Wlodarczyk.pdf [25.11.2017]; also, Twitter activity demonstrates the communication potential of the protests (Analiza #czarnyprotest vs. #białyprotest, Polityka w Sieci, 5.10.2016, http://politykawsieci.pl/ analiza-czarnyprotest-vs-bialyprotest/ [25.11.2017]).

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does not mean that previous forms are absent; they function simultaneously, though with lesser intensity). On the other hand, synchronic perspective might offer interesting insights into activist undertakings, and reveal dominant microtrends in the utilization of mobile technologies in infoactivistic practice, in other words the efforts to release, propagate or safeguard information in the circumstances of restricted access to the latter, all to achieve a mental, political, social or economic change. The microtrends, or ventures in the domain of infoactivism are highly diversified; at the same time they may pursue strategic (long-term) or tactical (action-oriented) goals. The following undertakings may be distinguished here: – creating new information circuits, – disclosing classified or disadvantageous information and participants in the information exchange; release of information and contents that are being blocked or withheld in various ways, – hiding information and participants in the information exchange – anonymization strategies, – hacking information channels of the opponent, – collecting grassroots information – information crowdsourcing, – metainfoactivism – education to infoactivism.17 These infoactivistic strategies and tactics using mobile technologies are characterized below based on case studies, mainly in the area of political activism.

2.1. Creating new information circuits Mobile media enable one to create alternative information circuits, especially in those situations where authoritarian governments cut off access to the internet or mobile network, thus disabling quick and efficient communication.

This function of mobile technology came to the fore in Egypt, when in January 2011 the authorities first blocked the use of Facebook services, then shut down the internet, and disabled making phone calls and texting. Communication was then enabled by establishing new pathways; the protesters were thus aided

by Telecomix activists who set up dial-up connections. These could be used by phone users who had modems with telephone access to international links. Using faxes sent to offices whose addresses could be found online, hacktivists sent out instructions on how to use mobile phones as modems. However, connecting with the outside world was one thing, but the real challenge lay in building a communication network that the protesters would use to get in touch with one another. Here, the wireless Mesh network proved useful, as it enabled A. Dytman-Stasieńko, Info-activism...

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communication based e.g. on Bluetooth protocols. Activists of the Telecomix group had to make allowances for the technologies available to the protesters, which is why they attempted to employ radio transceivers or walkie-talkies to develop the network. Ordinary radios with alarm clocks turned out to be quite invaluable; after minor modifications they served as links in the network with a range of about 2 km.

An enhanced version of Mesh was later used in Hong Kong, where protests broke out in 2014 (referred to as the Umbrella Revolution or the Umbrella Movement) following the announcement of undemocratic elections. The FireChat app saw massive use at the time, as it facilitated the creation of a Mesh network and exchange of information with other phone users over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth modules. FireChat was downloaded 100,000 times within 24 hours,18 for fear of internet and mobile connections being shut down.

Mesh networks are decentralized, and each user within a radius of approximately 70 km may become a hub or node. The more users there are, the larger and faster the network becomes, yet it is not all too safe, because it does not ensure anonymity to the users.19 The network is a useful means of communication when for some reasons users do not have access to the internet (not only because it has been blocked by an authoritarian government, but also in situations where the communication infrastructure has been destroyed in the wake of natural disasters or sustained traffic overload20).

Apps enabling anonymous exchange of information or furnishing information that is subject to cultural taboo also play a role in creating new information circuits. One of the examples is MyQuestion/My Answer, a service which is intended to tackle the issues of sexual education and health among young people in the countries of Africa (e.g. Kenya, Nigeria), where problems of that nature are indeed taboo. The service ensures safe and anonymous communication via text messages, and provides answers relating to sexual life, links to clinics in the vicinity and information on available counselling.21 18 P. Olson, FireChat Prepares Encryption Feature As It Drives Hong Kong Protests, “Forbes” 29.09.2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/09/29/firechat-prepares-encryption-feature-as-it-drives-hong-kong-protests/#7e6bfcb4682e [25.11.2017].

19 C. Shing, What yellow umbrellas and ‘mesh networks’ tell us about public space, “City Metric,” 20.10.2015, http://www.citymetric.com/horizons/what-yellow-umbrellas-and-meshnetworks-tell-us-about-public-space-1507 [25.11.2017].

20 FireChat was successfully used during the flood in Kashmir (2015), or following the eruption of the Cotopaxi volcano in Ecuador (2015) and hurricane Patricia in Mexico (2015), as well as at mass events in India, Canada, or the United States, https://www.opengarden.com/ firechat.html [25.11.2017].

21 My Question and My Answer Service, http://www.myquestion.org/about-us [25.02.

2018].

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2.2. Disclosure of classified or disadvantageous information and participants in information exchange The next strategy which seems important in the context of utilization of mobile media is disclosure of detrimental, censored information, as well as revealing participants in the exchange of information.

Both during the Orange Revolution and the Arab Spring, mobile media were a conduit for information that the authorities found inconvenient, or material from protests of which either no reports appeared in the state-controlled media or which were covered in the propagandistic vein. The documentary content provided by mobile media was a source of critical information, causing major turbulences in the information stream.22 This was poignantly demonstrated by a video recorded with a mobile phone, showing the agony of Neda Agha-Soltan, a student of philosophy who had been shot by the police during unrests in Iran in 2009.

Shared on Facebook, it quickly spread throughout the social media; the CNN material on Neda’s death reached two million views in late 2014, while Neda AghaSoltan – not a political activist herself but an ordinary Iranian who was outraged by the results of elections – became a symbol of the Iranian opposition.23 A similar pattern of action was seen in Tunisia, where the events called the Arab Spring, were precipitated by the self-immolation of a street vendor on December 17th, 2010, also documented in the form of a video that was later propagated via the social media.24 However, massively reposted explicit imagery, sparking protests or fuelling the anger of demonstrators, is not the only element of effective disclosure and circulation of information via mobile platforms, especially in conjunction with social media.

A different example of mobile exposure and dissemination of information, a textual one in this case, may be observed in the events in Jamaica, which lay at the foundation of the first mobile protest in that country.

In July 2011 a 17-year-old student was murdered. When the media broadcasted the news of his death on July 3rd, within hours BlackBerry users were flooded with information concerning the incident and calls to fight for justice.

The messages were sent not only by the victim’s family and friends, but also by more organized groups, with a Group K among them. It consisted of 29 young graduates of the university where the murdered young man had studied. The aim of the group was to spread the news of the murder to as large a number of 22 The concept of critical information is discussed more broadly in A. Dytman-Stasieńko, Info-activism...

23 I. Burum. S. Quinn, MOJO: The Mobile Journalism Handbook. How to make Broadcast Video with an iPhone or iPad?, New York – London 2016, p. 271.

24 Ibidem.

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recipients as possible so that the matter could not be hushed up. There was legitimate concern that it would be so, as the alleged murderer drove a luxurious vehicle; presumably, he belonged to a privileged social group and would have thus avoided responsibility.

Nevertheless, it was the first time that, instead of traditional forms (demonstrations, street blockades), people chose mobile technologies. Originators of the protest stated several reasons behind their decision: phones facilitated prompt dissemination of information (with the population of 2.7 million, there are ca. 4 million phones used in Jamaica) and time efficiency (traditional protests require time expenditure that the protesters were unable to afford due to professional duties). Furthermore, communication in traditional protests is limited to placards and shouting, whereas the activists intended to formulate a coherent narrative headlined by the slogan “We’re all equal in the eyes of the law,” which would compel the police and the government to take action they demanded25. Disclosing and spreading information by means of mobile technologies is a useful, effective and relatively cheap tactic. Still, one should bear in mind the impact of information thus propagated, visual content in particular, as they may elicit an unintended, emotion-driven response whose practical outcomes can no longer be contained.

2.3. Hiding information and participants of information exchange – anonymization strategies Mobile technologies prove an exceedingly useful tool in organizing and documenting protests or monitoring elections, which makes them a preferred instrument of political activism, but the usefulness comes at a price. There are serious risks involved as they are ideally suited for surveillance. In Syria, where each SIM card has to be registered, those who have been detained confirmed that they had been tracked via the mobile phones they used to convey information to Al Jazeera. The protesters tried to maintain anonymity in the simplest way possible, i.e. by taking SIM cards from the dead, which guaranteed relatively safe and anonymous communication.26 Various apps, running under Android for instance, can also ensure anonymity and security. Here, one could mention Orbot, an anonymous proxy to connect to the Tor network; Orweb, a browser which, when used with Orbot, L.G. Waller, C.A.L. Taylor, A Case Study of Citizen-to-Government Mobile Activism in Jamaica: Protesting Violation of the Rule of Law with Smart Phones, in Human Rights and Ethics: Concept, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications, Hershey 2014, pp. 596-612.

26 As Ramadan Begins, Assad Regime Intensifies Deadly Crackdown on Syrian Protesters, “Democracy Now. Independent Global News,” 2.08.2011, https://www.democracynow.org/ 2011/8/2/as_ramadan_begins_assad_regime_intensifies [25.11.2017].

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protects users from traffic analysis, blocks cookies and cleans browsing history; ObscuraCam encrypts or destroys image pixels; Off the Record is a protocol for high level encryption of instant messaging.

The use of encryption apps which protect the anonymity of communication participants is a great advantage to activists, but for numerous reasons it does not offer a perfect solution; a shortage of appropriate tools in the most important cause. Cheap phones are not equipped with the mobile hardware to install the apps.27 Other issues include ignorance of the ongoing, intense surveillance and lack of basic technological skill.28 2.4. Hacking hostile information channels – disrupting information flow So far, the potential inherent in mobile disruption of the opponent’s information channels has not been exploited to the full by political infoactivists. Mobile technologies are nevertheless capable of disrupting or disabling the flow of information in a variety of ways, such as one of the major methods: DOS attacks. The attack may target hostile mobile phones, and obstruct incoming and outgoing calls by jamming the GSM signal.29 Internet servers may also be thus attacked, using the AnDOSid app, for instance.30 Methods which have been previously applied online, as the above examples demonstrate, transplanted into small devices, smartphones in this case, and appropriately modified in view of their characteristics. Naturally, there are more smartphone apps which enable hacking information channels and tools of the opponent, for instance by blocking access to Wi-Fi (e.g. WiFiKill APK), and their more extensive utilization by infoactivists is only a matter of time.

2.5. Collecting grassroots information – information crowdsourcing Collecting grassroots information is an example of action whose goals go beyond politics. Information crowdsourcing is also in operation during political 27 Still, attempts are made to develop apps for outdated, cheap phones, such as the EPROM initiative in Kenya, see Ch. Kreutz, Mobile Activism in Africa: Future Trends and Software Developments, in S. Ekine (ed.), SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa, Cape Town – Dakar – Nairobi – Oxford 2010, p. 21.

28 Mobile Phone Security and Android Apps, FLOSS Manuals, http://write.flossmanuals. net/tech-tools-for-activism/mobile-phone-security-and-android-apps/ [25.11.2017].

29 How to intercept mobile communication (calls and messages) easily without hacking, https://iicybersecurity.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/how-to-intercept-mobile-communications-calls-and-messages-easily-without-hacking/ [25.11.2017].

30 AnDOSid – Android App for Hackers, http://www.effecthacking.com/2015/07/andosidandroid-app-apk-hackers-tutorial.html [25.11.2017].

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unrest, since sending text messages and videos from the sites of clashes or combat zones and posting them in social media are excellent means of delivering first-hand information. The latter is not intentionally categorized or profiled but constitute a bottom-up flow of information. Platforms created exclusively to gather grassroots information function in a slightly different manner, as the data they collect serves to visualize and map various phenomena, e.g. violence.

One of the most popular platforms of the kind is Ushahidi (meaning “testimony” in Swahili). Established in 2008, it compiled information and mapped sites of violence that Kenya witnessed in the course of post-election riots. Ushahidi is a free, open-source platform which enables gathering dispersed information via a range of channels: the internet, text messages, multimedia messaging, or e-mails. Ushahidi’s motto, “Help people raise their voice and those who serve them to listen and respond better” aptly reflects its objectives. The crowdmap generated thanks to information crowdsourcing is the simplest element, because it can be created in a matter of minutes. The major disadvantage is that it requires an adequate server and certain technical competence, but anyone can contribute to the updates by sending in reports.

Application of the platform is well exemplified in the activities of Harrasmap, an organization established in 2010 in Cairo. They define their mission as getting the entire Egyptian society involved in building an environment where sexual abuse is not tolerated. The task appears to be anything but easy, given that according to the reports of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights two thirds of Egyptian women suffer from sexual abuse daily.31 Activists from Harrasmap want to give voice to women, which is why they employ the Ushahidi platform (integrating it with the FrontlineSMS service32) to map instances of sexual abuse across Egypt. Victims or witnesses of abuse may send pertinent information by means of texts, e-mails, tweets, or multimedia messages, anonymously of course. Each informant receives a return message providing information on free psychological or legal counselling. The incidents are then mapped to undermine the widespread notions of sexual abuse, though above all it attests to the fact that it does take place. Moreover, the map indicates locations where women are at their greatest risk of suffering from sexual abuse, which may help them to avoid harassment.

Collecting grassroots information enables one to contribute to activist undertakings without becoming too deeply involved as an informant, which in itself might encourage participation in the process of gathering information.

31 Egypt’s interior ministry to launch new efforts to battle sexual harassment, http://ecwronline.org/?p=821 [25.11.2017].

32 FrontlineSMS is an app which transforms a laptop equipped with a GSM modem and the mobile phone into a communications centre, enabling large-scale, two-way exchange of text-based information.

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2.6. Metainfoactivism – education to infoactivism The last aspect of undertakings within infoactivism is metainfoactivism, or education to infoactivism (understood broadly, not only in its mobile variety). These kind of info educational goals are pursued by the activists of the international Tactical Technology Collective. Their watchword, “Turning information into action,” defines what they focus on: empower others through education to employ information effectively in activist undertakings. Naturally, mobile media and their efficacious application in infoactivism is one of the areas of interest.

Therefore, the collective developed the Mobile-in-a-Box, a set of tools, tactics, guides and case studies designed to increase competence in using mobile technologies for the purposes of activism. Its creators concentrate on a number of core issues, such as help and awareness-raising in the field, participation, fundraising, resource mobilization, people’s media, as well as mobilizing and coordination. They also show how media technologies, e.g. mobile media and the internet, can be effectively combined. In 2009, Mobile-in-a-Box33 was recognized with the Manthan Award. In fact, mobile media feature in each project developed by Tactical Technology Collective. Their Me and My Shadow34 (which received the Deutsche Welle Bobs Award for the most creative online activism), introduces methods of erasing digital footprint online and in mobile media, whereas Security-in-a-Box35 offers guidelines on how to install software ensuring digital security, also on devices such as mobile phones. The projects are intended to be used as state-of-the-art teaching aids at activist trainings and courses. Members of the group believe that competent usage of information promotes proper perception and response, which is why they assist activists in their work on data analysis and visualization, and teach how to navigate the digital world safely. Each of the dedicated toolkits is intended to raise awareness of opportunities and risks, furnish tools, suggest strategies and tactics of action, as well as present case studies.36 In Poland, the Panoptykon foundation offers a positive example of education to infoactivism, by virtue of its efforts to foster liberty and protection of human rights in a society under surveillance.37 The foundation spreads information on the surveillance-related phenomena, propagates knowledge of the threats of external, clandestine supervision and suggests various resistance strategies.

Their educational activities focus on raising awareness of the ways in which information is exploited in media communication, how it may be generated, https://archive2013.tacticaltech.org/mobilesinabox [25.11.2017]. https://archive2013.tacticaltech.org/node/516.html [25.11.2017].

35 https://archive2013.tacticaltech.org/securityinabox.html [25.11.2017].

36 https://archive2013.tacticaltech.org/whatwedo.html [25.11.2017].

37 Fundacja Panoptykon, Misja, https://panoptykon.org/misja [20.02.2018].

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distorted, fabricated or obtained (not only by individual users but also by much more powerful players, such as corporations and governments). Most importantly, the foundation teaches others how information should be safeguarded.

One of their interesting initiatives is Cyfrowa Wyprawka [Digital Starter Kit],38 a website offering a volume of ready-made material for infoeducation in the digital world, containing lessons scenarios (Lesson Plans39), practical methodological advice for educators (Educational Guidelines40) and articles concerned with digital safety (Resource Base41). The foundation also provides paid trainings for teachers and pupils as well as expert lectures. What they do undoubtedly represents the correct and desired direction in infoeducation, although the matter requires consistent work at different stages of education (from nursery schools to universities of the third age) in the form of regularly held workshops or a separate educational programme or curriculum.

The aforesaid strategies and tactics of using mobile media in infoactivistic practice serve a number of fundamental objectives that are associated with rapid exchange of information: – correct reception of information, – mobilization to action, – coordination of action (protest), – documenting action in real time, – reaching the audience – often a transnational one – and building a support network as a result.

Conclusions It would appear that mobile technologies, or media technologies in general – now so commonplace as to be virtually unnoticeable – are an ideal tool of effective action for infoactivists. However, one should consider several reservations that may stem from certain simplifications.

It should be emphasized, obvious though it might seem, that media do not initiate the revolution; designations such as “Twitter Revolution” or “Facebook Revolution” are convenient labels applied with some substantial exaggeration.

They sell well in the mainstream media, but they obscure the actual nature of a conflict. The path leading to revolutions, protests, and anti-government demonstrations is usually a long and complex process; mobile and social media may provide handy tools to disseminate information, mobilize and coordinate http://cyfrowa-wyprawka.org/ [25.11.2017]. http://cyfrowa-wyprawka.org/lekcje [25.11.2017].

40 http://cyfrowa-wyprawka.org/metodyka [25.11.2017].

41 Ibidem.

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action, or gain international audience. Their potential becomes particularly evident when the opponent does not appreciate their power (as during the insurgency of the Zapatistas or the Arab Spring). Alone, however, they are not a revolutionary instrument. Mobile activism entails numerous challenges, such as high costs of calls and texts in many countries of Africa, unequal access to technology between urbanized areas and the countryside, or deficits of technological competence.

Further caveats are associated with the strength of commitment that is brought to bear thanks to mobile media. As Christian Kreutz underlines, even the best app is useless without the critical mass of participation and involvement.42 Mobile media have made it possible to take part in protests and, albeit mediated, it occurs in real time which creates an illusion of involvement and amounts to only ostensible participation in acts of resistance happening far away from where the mediated user resides, or sometimes close by and yet in a remote place: offline.

The role and power of media, the role of the internet, mobile and social media in activism has been debated for many years, both by cyberutopians and cyber-pessimists.43 One of its most heated episodes followed the 2010 publication of a text

by Malcolm Gladwell, Small change. Why the revolution will not be tweeted, which appeared in “The New Yorker.”44 Gladwell argued that the role of new media in stoking revolution is overestimated. The author drew on the observations of Evgeni Morozov, who emphasized that the phrase “Twitter revolution” can hardly apply to Moldova, where few people have Twitter accounts. He also questioned Twitter’s dominant role in Iran, citing Iranian commentator Golnaz Esfiandiari, who wondered why Iranians would coordinate their actions in the English-speaking #iranelection feed instead of using their native language.

Gladwell asserts that activism generated through social media is an activism of feeble ties and low risk, unlike the traditional activism where bonds between people are strong and risks run high. The weakness lies in the networked nature of such activism, which thus represents a contrast to the robust structures of traditional activism. Furthermore, activism in social media does not necessitate substantial effort nor commitment.

Ch. Kreutz, Mobile Activism in Africa..., s. 26.

Among cyber-optimists, one finds e.g. Clay Shirky (C. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody. The Power of Organizing without Organizations, London – New York 2008); on the opposing side, there are intellectuals such as Evgeny Morozov (E. Morozov, The Net Delusion. The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, New York 2012).

44 M. Gladwell, Small change. Why the revolution will not be tweeted, “The New Yorker,” 27.09.2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all [25.11.2017].

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The text sparked a violent backlash, with practitioners and theorists of activism speaking out. The author was critiqued for failing to understand activism and the idea of social media.45 He was, it was claimed, very much in the wrong confronting weak and strong ties as they are in fact complementary to one another rather than opposed,46 while contrasting traditional and digital activism is highly problematic.47 The example shows that the debate is a turbulent one, while adversaries hold tenaciously to their positions.48 In that torrent of arguments, one finds some eloquent contentions in the article entitled Social Media Made the Arab Spring, but Couldn’t Save It, whose author maintains that new technologies did not constitute a new path to democracy but merely provided a tool49 and they should be treated as such: useful, though often dangerous instruments. They are useful because they offer a space where freedom of speech can unfold; they are vessels that facilitate organizational effort, mobilization and dissemination of information. There are hazards too, because governments, authoritarian ones in particular, exploit them to track users and spread misinformation. A medium, especially a mobile one, is just as any tool, in this case a tool of communication: useful. For either side of the conflict.

Summary Mobile Infoactivism – Development, Typology, Technological Contexts The aim of the article is to present the concept of mobile infoactivism which organizes activist practices from the technological perspective as well as according to different ways of using information. First the author presents mobile activism in a diachronic perspective and then characterizes the main strategies and tactics of mobile infoactivism.

Keywords: mobile technologies, infoactivism, mobile infoactivism, collective action, protest, digital security Słowa kluczowe: technologie mobilne, infoaktywizm, mobilny infoaktywizm, działania kolektywne, protest, bezpieczeństwo cyfrowe 45 A. Fine, Malcolm Gladwell strikes out on activism, 28.09.2010, http://afine2.wordpress. com/2010/09/28/malcolm-gladwell-strikes-out-on-activism/ [25.11.2017].

46 Z. Tufekci, What Gladwell Gets Wrong: The Real Problem is Scale Mismatch (Plus, Weak and Strong Ties are Complementary and Supportive), http://technosociology.org/?p=178 [25.11.2017].

47 J.C. York, The False Pole of Digital and Traditional Activism, 27.09.2010, http://jilliancyork.com/2010/09/27/the-false-poles-of-digital-and-traditional-activism/ [25.11.2017].

48 B. Wasik, Gladwell vs. Shirky: A Year Later, Scoring the Debate Over Social-Media Revolutions, “Wired,” 12.27.2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/12/gladwell-vs-shirky/ [25.11. 2017].

49 J. Hempel, Social Media Made the Arab Spring, but Couldn’t Save It, “Wired,” 26.01.2016.

Agata Skórzyńska Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań Institute of Cultural Studies

“The Students’ Flat Project.”1 Mobile Media and Educational Research Workshop Method Introduction The aim of this text is twofold. Firstly, it presents the outcomes of an educational research project, carried out with participation of cultural studies students in Poznań as part of the grant entitled Mobility: Media, Urban Practices and Students’ Culture.2 The project launched in autumn 2015 during a course in animation methods involving three groups of students; its preliminary results were communicated in May 2016 at the seminar Visual Methods in Mobile Media Research.3 In this text, we address only a selection of issues which emerged as the research was being conducted. A more synthetic description of how it proceeded, the applied methods, collected material and conclusions is provided in the summary report. A proportion of the information is also conveyed in the presentation available on the website of the “Mobility” project. Secondly and more importantly, the text sets out to outline a type of research where students are involved, thus drawing attention to a practice of educational research, which integrates their effort to solve a problem with acquisition of basic quali1 Participating in the project were 27 students majoring in Cultural Studies from three lab groups, as well as flat- or roommates and students from other faculties and universities, invited to join at specific stages. The final version of the presentation of findings was developed by Laura Foremska, Paula Michalska, Aleksandra Wachowiak, Dominik Brzycki, and Rafał Szczepaniak. Other participants included Eryk Hałas, Marta Kościńska, Zuzanna Wiśniewska, Marta Wróblewska, Milena Kinecka i Martyna Żaglewska, Jutta Algierska, Michał Chmielewski, Katarzyna Poleszak, Aleksandra Schedler, Marysia Skonieczka and Helena Urban.

2 National Science Centre grant no. 2014/13/B/HS2/00109 Mobility: Media, Urban Practices and Students’ Culture. Project website: http://kulturymobilne.pl/ [27.05.2017].

3 The seminar may be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS89DoeFfB8 [27.05.

2017].

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tative study skills that rely on action and collaboration. Consequently, the first part of the paper discusses the premises of the method and its implementation.

Subsequent fragments contain authorial accounts by three participants: Laura Foremska, Paula Michalska and Aleksandra Wachowiak. Dominik Brzycki and Rafał Szczepaniak need to be credited as well, having developed visual material used in the project and graphics for the presentation.

The research project entitled Mobility: Media, Urban Practices and Students’ Culture spans documentation, analysis and interpretation of cultural practices in which students in an urban environment engage in the circumstances determined by current technological transformation, referred to as “mobilisation of media.”4 The research team thus focused on varied cultural practices occurring in the cityscape in which use of mobile media plays a role.

However, the mobility of students who participated and contributed in the project is not defined exclusively in terms of media, but three overlapping problem areas. First, it denotes social mobility,5 owing to the status of the social group that students constitute and the stage in their biographical experience. Thus, for a proportion of students this might mean education-related advance (upward mobility), whereas for others a movement from towns to cities (horizontal mobility associated with a change of profession or social standing). Thanks to university studies, some of them are going to anchor their professional and private life in large urban centres, even though it may not be the city where they have attended higher education; academic centres tend to be “transit” cities which facilitate moving to other larger cities (though returning to native towns does often occur as well). Secondly, it relates to a mode in which students function in a city: temporariness, mobility in the physical urban environment which establishes a singular “student” topographies of each academic city. Thirdly, it is defined by the emergence of novel media technologies, which translates into constant commutation between online and offline realities, as well as technological-mediatic intervention into the experience of the physical city space and specific “worlds of everyday life.”6 The latter entails a particular kind of “cartographic imagination,” as characterized by Nacher (especially given the use of location and positioning systems as well as various forms of digital Cf. entry for “mobile media” by Magdalena Kamińska: http://kulturymobilne.pl/slownikwpis/?subpage=1; and entry for “social media” by Tomasz Żaglewski: http://kulturymobilne.pl/ slownik-wpis/?subpage=2 on the project’s website [28.05.2017].

5 Cf. B. Szacka, Wprowadzenie do socjologii, Warszawa 2003, pp. 294-297; P. Sztompka, Socjologia. Analiza społeczeństwa, Kraków 2003, pp. 339-344; A. Giddens, Socjologia, transl.

A. Szulżycka, Warszawa 2005, pp. 322-327.

6 A. Schütz, O wielości światów. Szkice z socjologii fenomenologicznej, transl. B. Jabłońska, Kraków 2008; J. Habermas, Postęp techniczny i społeczny świat życia, transl. Z. Krasnodębski, in Z. Krasnodębski (ed.), Teoria i praktyka. Wybór pism, Warszawa 1983.

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mapping),7 and simultaneously transforms numerous practices associated with students’ functioning within a city. Finally, it generates new places that exist next to typical “student sites” on the map (university premises, student housing facilities, clubs): groups in social networking sites, discussion groups which in fact double as platforms for learning, social life, notices and classifieds, file sharing, gossip, etc.

These three tiers that define mobility fit into the spectrum between individual and collective social mobility of individuals and groups (as construed in traditional sociology) and the mobility reformulated by e.g. John Urry, Arjun Appadurai and various concepts of “nomadism.”8 For instance, according to the author of Mobilities and Sociology Beyond Society, the mobility of people, things, ideas and information, as well as “systems” which enable it (telephones and smartphones, internet sites, transportation services and their infrastructure, tourism opportunities, electronic ticket platforms and, in this particular case, student exchange, work and volunteer programmes e.g. au pair, international and national institutional exchange, such as Socrates-Erasmus, MOST) lead to a situation where, in the social-cultural experience of students, multiple categories of the reality framework (which one could call ontological keys),9 such as “place,” “city,” “home” as well as “time” (devoted to leisure/work), “private,” or “common” begin to lose their integrity and grow problematic at the same time.

In this project, we decided to take advantage of that complex experience of mobility in a two-fold function: as an object of inquiry and a research method in students’ projects. With the former, the goal was to determine the extent to which the experience transforms various practices of the students: from artistic, animation and activist undertakings to ordinary daily activities. However, today, in the context of social, spatial and media mobility these distinctions prove so convoluted that the status of “daily life” needs to be considered separately.

Furthermore, we opted to use mobile media as research tools to collect data (e.g. visual material), streamline organization and communication in the course of the project, as well as present the outcomes of students’ projects. The capabilities of mobile media (e.g. smartphone photography) also provided the chief means of expression in visual art projects carried out by students.

A. Nacher, Media lokacyjne. Ukryte życie obrazów, Kraków 2016, pp. 149-150.

J. Urry, Mobilities, Cambridge 2007; idem, Socjologia mobilności, transl. J. Stawiński, Warszawa 2009; A. Appadurai, Nowoczesność bez granic, transl. Z. Pucek, Kraków 2005.

9 These draw on Goffman’s category of interpretive keys, which we employed in the analysis of social frames. In this case, the keys not only serve to recognize social conventions that govern situations in which we partake, but also decode the ontological status of elements in the world with which we interact. Cf. E. Goffman, Analiza ramowa. Esej z organizacji doświadczenia, transl. S. Budzirej, Kraków 2010.

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At the stage of the project which involved second-year undergraduate students as part of a methodology lab, our principal area of interest was the impact of the experience of mobility on the present-day, altered notions of “student culture.” Having adopted at the outset that the augmentation and “mobilification” affects our experience of places, areas, environments, boundaries and landmarks we use in the relationship with urbanized reality, our understanding of student culture is likely to be similarly influenced. Therefore, we decided that the pool of artistic and animation practices that were the object of investigation in the grant should be expanded to include such aspects of students’ functioning in a city as habitation, learning and exchange of knowledge, temporary work, leisure time, social engagements, and social activism. As determined by the group concerned, “The Students’ Flat Project” focuses on the first of the above issues, though other practices did manifest themselves during the work.

Other types of practices will be targeted in the course of future workshops.

1. The educational research workshop method With respect to methodology, “The Students’ Flat Project” relied on an integration of three research traditions: 1) participatory action research (PAR), in which we decided to combine the knowledge yield with the development of collaboration skills and proficiency in research techniques; 2) mobile media research; 3) visual studies. This determined how our undertaking proceeded.

Firstly, since the project was geared towards participation and action, all its elements were planned jointly with students during lab classes. This is vital, because as a result students were involved in the project as “collaborators,” a role characteristic of action research; in other words they were both researchers and representatives of the group whose cultural experience and practices were being analyzed. The role of the person conducting the workshop (i.e. myself) was to act as a moderator and consultant for the project. Its theoretical background, methodological choices, selection of the issue (specific practice to be analyzed), formulation of the topic, the research problem and the questions were all addressed during classes. It was on their own, however, that the students had to tackle collecting material, managing communication in teams, or meetings “in the field.” The set of research tools, though they draw in part on the techniques known from qualitative inquiry (interview, observation, etc.), was creatively adapted by students, both in view of the focus on mobile media and visual research as well as the educational bias; after all, the project was to foster the skill of designing research toolkits independently and allow for their creative transformation, rather than require students to reproduce research techniques.

The students were divided into three work teams, but they were also tasked

“The Students’ Flat Project”...

Photo 1. The phases of research process

Photo 2. Map of the students’ flats

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Photo 3. Layout of an apartment with “emoticons”

with enrolling further people into the study: students from other faculties and universities (most often flatmates), friends, colleagues, or partners.

Secondly, mobile photographs and their analysis proved an important element (selected examples are provided below), although they accounted only for a part of the generated visual material. Prior to working on the project, a number of students took part in mobile photography workshops.10 As for Information on the workshops conducted by Cezary Dziadurski from the “Mobilni” Group may be found on the project’s website: http://kulturymobilne.pl/przygotowane-warsztaty/?subpage=1 [28.05.2017].

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Photo 4. One of the Facebook project groups

the procedure, smartphone imagery was analyzed in terms of technological performance of mobile photography and with respect to what was captured and how it was done. The latter is highly interesting, because due to the ease of image capture and editing (processing apps, filters), the possibility of using photographs in social networking and the channels through which students shared it among themselves are certain to have influenced the visual conventions and aesthetic preferences (typical of mobile and social media aesthetics) that the photographers opted for.

Third, the students in the three teams decided to design their own research techniques, some of which owed both to the topic (practices of habitation) and the utilization of specific media to generate and disseminate the outcomes of the project. The most interesting of the tools they developed included topographic and notional maps (showing locations of the apartments in the city and layouts of the apartments, with its internal “areas” tagged by emoticon-like symbols), schedules (to replace conventional qualitative interviews) by means of which students would describe ways of spending time at the apartment, and a blog on which one could post “anecdotes” (describing particular situations involving landlords or flatmates). For the purposes of the project, students also created closed groups on a social media platform which they used for communication, exchanging materials and conversations with project participants from outside the initial lab class groups. There were also two “course” groups on Facebook, in which I also participated. A proportion of the collected material was presented

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in lab classes by means of multimedia presentations. The presentation available on the project’s website includes a number of proposals selected from among those submitted by the three teams during classes.

2. Student culture as urban culture.

The expanded field of practices The traditional understanding of student culture, which has become well entrenched in cultural inquiry, applies largely to Polish culture before 1989, and it is distinguished by two chief traits. Firstly, student culture reflects – in a manner characteristic of that particular social group – the official art culture with its various domains. This accounts for the extensively developed branch of studies concerned with student theatre, cabaret, or output in the field of literature, music or visual arts in Poland.11 Secondly, in the realities of the People’s Republic of Poland, cultural activity among students would be most strongly associated with the institutional framework (i.e. the very institution of university or higher education establishment, as well as with student organizations), even if – as in the case of student theatre – it led with time to functioning in the independent realm beyond it. The most important artistic events, festivals, and the emergence of particular milieus was by default linked with academic institutions. From the standpoint of studies in the city, student culture may be aligned with classical concepts of areas and institutions of urban culture – ones typically encountered in urban sociology, for instance – such as the approach advanced by Aleksander Wallis and revisited by Ewa Rewers.12 Thus, student culture would constitute a variant of urban culture, resulting from the presence of particular (academic) institutions and places (university premises, student housing facilities and clubs). Interestingly enough, although the designs of the first Polish campuses on city outskirts date back to the socialist era (e.g. the Morasko campus in Poznań), this notion of where student life may be situated in an urban space was put into practice mostly after 1989, and even then to a limited extent.13 The majority of sites and institutions that were vital to student Cf. T. Nyczek, Pełnym głosem. Teatr studencki w Polsce 1970-1975, Kraków 1980; S. Magala, Polski teatr studencki jako element kontrkultury, Warszawa 1988; A. Nalaskowski, Sztuka obrzeży – sztuka centrum, Warszawa 1986; I. Skórzyńska, Teatry poznańskich studentów (1953-1989). Konteksty. Historie. Intepretacje, Poznań 2002.

12 E. Rewers, Miejska przestrzeń kulturowa. Od laboratorium do warsztatu, in E. Rewers (ed.), Kulturowe studia miejskie. Wprowadzenie, Warszawa 2014, p. 27.

13 Unlike the campuses in the US and Western Europe, their Polish equivalents, even those located in the urban periphery (e.g. Morasko in Poznań) have not grown into student towns. By and large, the sites lack student housing of any kind, clubs, shops, etc. that would accompany university teaching and research facilities.

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culture – in the traditional, area-institutional understanding – were located in city centres or their immediate vicinity. That understanding of student culture is aptly recapitulated in the comprehensive volume entitled Kultura studencka – zjawisko, twórcy, instytucje,14 edited by Edward Chudziński and published by Fundacja STU. The range of issues it covers (theatre, exhibitions and galleries, publishing activity, festivals, etc.) demonstrates that post-war student milieus were an important locus of Polish art culture that developed in university towns.

However, there are two reasons for which the artistic, area-related and institutional understanding of student culture is no longer tenable. Firstly, the relation between city and culture is now differently construed in urban research itself. Secondly, there have been a number of radical transformations of academic life in Poland, the university has undergone institutional reforms, while students’ life experience has witnessed major changes as well. Let us then address the latter. From the 1990’s onwards, the number of students in Poland has consistently increased, to peak during the educational boom in the early 21st century. According to a 2013 report of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, there were 390,409 students in Poland in 1990, but in 2001 the figure reached 1,764,060 in 2011 (which means that the net enrolment ratio soared from 9.8% to 40.6%).15 Attending higher education has become widespread, and its forms diversified rapidly with new private colleges, new majors, new modes and forms of studying (scholarship opportunities, interfaculty studies, programmes at external institutions, division into undergraduate and graduate studies, which not only impacted mobility within one university but also encouraged migration between universities in one city, between private and public schools, as well as various academic centres). At least some of those processes have caused the affiliation of students and their activities with specific academic communities (e.g. course groups, years, majors, faculties, teachers) and institutions to become more flexible. Admittedly, student organizations such as their self-governing bodies still undertake cultural initiatives addressed to students, but they have quite quickly been reduced to organizing mass events of a more commercial nature (juwenalia – the student festival). Instead, daily activities of student self-governments and corporations have become increasingly geared towards participation in university procedures, administration and power structures, as well as supporting students’ careers.

Student lifestyle is changing as well (with a considerable number taking up gainful work at the beginning of their studies), while their communities as well as creative and social activities are to an ever greater degree associated with non-university contexts; at a certain point this is chiefly club culture, but E. Chudziński (ed.), Kultura studencka – zjawisko, twórcy, instytucje, Kraków 2001.

The report comprises GUS and POLon data for 1990/1991-2011/2012, Cf. Szkolnictwo wyższe w Polsce, Warszawa 2013, pp. 5-6.

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throughout the transformation period one observes increasingly stronger associations with the NGO sector that continued to develop and become more professional in Poland. Student milieus, especially those which prove the most active in the socio-cultural domains, seldom confine themselves to groups or years studying together, adopting a more networked profile instead, bringing together people from different universities, as well as students and graduates, animators, artists, etc. It should be noted that art culture has undergone a transformation as well, being increasingly oriented towards interdisciplinary phenomena and intermediality. Large-scale events that assume the form of interdisciplinary festivals enjoy rising popularity (students are not only the audience as they often collaborate with the promoters), and project-based work mode spreads dynamically, engaging students in numerous temporary undertakings and cooperation forms. Finally, the boundaries between artistic culture, popular culture and lifestyle-related practices become gradually blurred. Projects aiming at attractive leisure often serve to combine creative activities with entertainment, for example in the shape of hugely popular workshops (design, crafts, etc.) breakfast fairs, clothing swaps, food-truck festivals, open-air and club events. The singular nature of participation – also participation of young people – in the diversified but also a hierarchical or informal cultural initiatives combined with increasingly extensive use of media was in its time very aptly portrayed in Spacerowicze, nomadzi, sieciowi łowcy okazji,16 a report covering research conducted in Cracow.

Still, the recent decades have witnessed a change in how the relationship between the cultural and the urban reality is approached. In the wake of the cultural turn, the centrally situated, institutionalized vision of official culture in urban studies is gradually supplanted by notions of a mosaic of multiple urban cultures, whose spatial representation is an archipelago with indistinct boundaries rather that spatially demarcated and/or hierarchical domains, subsystems, and even subcultures.17 What is more, the scope of what is cultural in a city is consistently expanded in related 20th-century research, subsuming not only art or institutional culture but also the varied cultural practices and experience of diverse groups, including everyday city life, practices of consumption, leisure, work, intimate relationships, habitations, strolling in the city, etc. Ultimately, at least since Lefebvre, Bourdieu, and de Certeau,18 urban reality has been increasingly often seen as a pluralistic and dynamic field of practices19: lin A. Nacher (ed.), Spacerowicze, nomadzi i sieciowi łowcy okazji, Kraków (no date).

E. Rewers, Miejska przestrzeń kulturowa..., pp. 42-45.

18 Cf. J. Roberts, Philosophising the Everyday. Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory, London 2006.

19 The term “field of practices” is borrowed from Theodor R. Schatzki. Admittedly, albeit not identical with Bourdieu’s conception of field, but it is still anchored in the theory of 16

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guistic, material, visual, and corporeal ones, practices associated with power, ownership, generation of knowledge and space, production and utilization of technology, etc. Significantly enough, the tradition of approaching the culture in terms of practice and praxis (in the latter case the attention is also directed towards the city as a political space) brings about a shift of emphasis in urban analysis: from the level of collective consciousness to the level of reified and materialized intelligibility that governs our actions; from the level of centralized political visions imposed from above to the level urban politicality, embodied and realized by acting people, in which living, eating, walking, producing places are a stage where the interests of distinct individuals and groups tend to clash.

In any case, contemporary concepts of practices add another component to our understanding of the culture in a city, which turns out to be crucial from the standpoint of mobility: the reciprocal relations between acting people and the natural and artefactual reality. For this reason, the notion of mundane praxis is substantially redefined, compared for instance with the understanding contended by the author of La Revolution Urbaine.20

3. Everyday life in an urbanized reality.

Dynamism, density, mobility According to German sociologist Theodor R. Schatzki, practices are an engine which generates the dynamic, processual “arrangements of people, artefacts, and things.”21 Schatzki’s conception is one of the most popular practice theories today, rooted in Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, Habermas, in phenomenology and structuration theory. Even more importantly, the 20th-century variants of practical philosophies had led the author to advance a new social ontology which actively dialogues with the ontological turn and post-humanist orientations, chiefly via the Deleuze’s and Guattari’s assemblage framework.22 This bears

practice propounded by the French sociologist: T.R. Schatzki, Introduction. Practice Theory, in T.R. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina, E. von Savigny (eds), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London – New York 2001, s. 11.

20 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, transl. R. Bononno, Minneapolis 2003.

21 T.R. Schatzki, Practice Mind-ed Orders, in T.R. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina, E. von Savigny (eds), The Practice Turn..., pp. 50-63; idem, The Site of the Social. A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change, University Park, PA 2002; idem, Social Practices.

A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and The Social, Cambridge – New York – Melbourne 1996.

22 The notion of arrangements draws in any case on several other concepts developed within post-structural philosophy (Foucault’s dispostif, or machines in Guattari and Deleuze), as well as on e.g. the Actor-Network Theory. T.R. Schatzki, The Site of the Social...

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significantly on our proposal as the concept of urban assemblage becomes increasingly widespread in the frequently critical urban studies.23 Although the latter, having been undertaken in the spirit of ANT or the assemblage paradigm, were initially oriented towards the relationships between humans and technology, urban infrastructure or urbanized nature, the new ontological imagination has with time yielded several fundamental observations on the urbanized reality as a domain of practices which engender dynamic transformations of urban “arrangements.”

First, an ontological change affects the status of everyday life, which ceases to be a rudimentary phenomenological reality with its gradually superimposed mental tiers, or a basic materialistic reality with its overlaid superstructure of consciousness. It is no longer construed as a lower-level reality, as tactical grassroots facing a city-as-a-concept, urban strategies or “city mentality,” becoming instead the sole ontological plane from which urbanized life springs. Here, practices are a dynamic nexus of doings and sayings24 as well as thoughts and actions which are capable of generating intricate, supra-individual complexes in space and time.

Second, practice theories redirect one’s attention from the extensiveness to intensity of urban life. The baseline concepts of expansion of urban reality (planetary urbanization, citification of reality, urban sprawl, demographic breakthrough) are supplemented by a perspective thanks to which the inner density of cities is exposed. On the other hand, in a diachronic perspective, the structural processes of reproduction and change are augmented by consideration given to emergent phenomena.

Third, practices undertaken by various subjects and groups encompass both thought and action expressed through organizing and transforming space, through production and materialization of notions (visualizing, expressing experience and views), and as such enable one to recapture the cultural modes of reproducing and changing urban reality. The culture of praxis becomes a “social self-reflection in action.”25 This practical experience of urban reality, its diversity and dynamism can be examined today by analyzing daily practices of various groups. How has daily experience of city topography been changing among students since they gained access to technologies enabling spatial orientation? The student map of a city A. Amin, N. Thrift, Cities. Reimagining the Urban, Cambridge – Oxford – Malden 2002; I. Farias, T. Bender (eds), Urban Assemblages. How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, London – New York 2010; H. Kamalipour, N. Peimani, Assemblage Thinking and the City: Implications for Urban Studies, “Current Urban Studies” 3/2015; I. Farias, The Politics of Urban Assemblages, “CITY” 15(3-4)/2011.

24 T.W. Schatzki, Social Practices...

25 Z. Bauman, Kultura jako praxis, transl. J. Konieczny, Warszawa 2012.

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shows how dispersed the group is, while interviews demonstrate that location of residence is more often dictated by Lynch’s nodes,26 such as a bus or tram stop, a grocery or a park, rather than academic institutions. The distance from the university buildings is as important as the distance to one’s work or the city centre with its cultural or entertainment opportunities. Students do not have their own district in Poznań, but the city centre, is much more preferable than its periphery. Student flats, a decidedly more popular form of habitation than rented rooms or university housing, are in themselves an interesting phenomenon and a meeting place of various practical experiences. Most often, they are inhabited by students from outside Poznań, and in frequent cases they are rented jointly by persons who know one another, as well as by complete strangers. Such apartments are not owned by students, but constitute someone’s property; therefore, it is not public nor held in common (relations with the owners are one of the leading themes in students’ anecdotal accounts).

Thus, they are neither one’s own, ours nor someone else’s. The “pact of inviolability of the walls”27 dictates an aesthetic of temporariness (which invariably characterizes students’ habitation), though today it is also tied up with rehashing ready-made, corporate aesthetics in the manner of IKEA Hackers.28 Students devote much attention to intimacy which is sustained thanks to movable yet personalized objects. Simultaneously, their everyday experience depends to a fair extent on technologically mediated forms of collective existence. Time spent with Facebook friends may be as important as the time spent with flatmates. Exchange of information on an apartment’s “notice board” may resemble posting content in social media. Students find it important to manifest their selves through places, objects, mundane activities, even food (food porn), but this is an aestheticized privacy, censored to a degree by the fact that nowadays it can be so easily and promptly shared with others. The accounts below focus on a singular phenomenology of student habitation: familiarizing a place by means of artefacts, on provisionality of being, on establishing relative division of what is one’s own and what is common. However, this is also a phenomenology entangled in the fact that their lives are marked by multiplied mobility, a capacity to traverse physical, social and technological dimensions in the contemporary cities-assemblages.

K. Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge 1960.

A designation used by students involved in project.

28 IKEA Hackers are persons who, utilizing ready-made products by the Swedish manufacturer, develop conversions or conceive alternative applications of the furniture or elements of interior design. The communities of IKEA Hackers have their websites and fan pages in social media, where they post images and descriptions of particular arrangements.

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Laura Foremska Co-sharing. Common and private space in a student apartment The personal and the common A student apartment, the main object of inquiry in our projects, represents an interesting “testing area.” Each of the apartments that were visualized and described by participants had its unique characteristics, but we have been able to detect certain general tendencies in students’ modes of habitation. This text addresses the relationship between the personal and the common within the space of the apartment. Is there place for privacy there? Can any common areas be identified? What are the ways of organizing the personal and the shared spheres?

I have decided to employ the terms “personal space” and “common space” because they aptly reflect the specificity of areas inside a student apartment; “public space” and “private space” are unlikely to encapsulate their nature that well.29 An apartment of the kind is not a property of the students but belongs to its owner, who makes its premises available for a period of time. The residents have to comply with the owner’s requirements, otherwise having to face consequences, therefore they are not at unrestricted liberty to decide about the space they occupy. The apartment is offered for such lease in the free market, which makes it hardly a public property as in the case of residence hall that constitutes an alternative mode of accommodation. Students renting an apartment usually have much more independence and freedom, not having to check in immediately or be concerned about receiving guests and putting them up. They are not constantly controlled, since the landlord visits the apartment only now and again. Very often, residents in the apartment do not know one another, finding out about their characters and lifestyles as time goes by. It is a home but its nature is uniquely open: guests are often seen there, friends of the residents, who again are strangers to others. The relationship between the personal and the common is a temporary one, but most of all it is negotiable since such spaces are not imposed from above. As people come to reside there, specific areas and ways in which they are put to use have to be agreed on (whether duties will be shared, whether and how many guests can be brought/stay overnight, whether belongings of others may be used and their 29 R. Drozdowski, M. Krajewski (eds), Prywatnie o publicznym/Publicznie o prywatnym, Poznań 2007.

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room entered during their absence to borrow something or use the balcony – these matters are covered in an unspoken agreement the residents have to arrive at jointly). Since this is an unofficial covenant, the boundaries of mutual use of space may be infringed both by the residents, the guests and the landlord.

In the interviews collected in the course of the project, there was e.g. a story about a landlord who would visit the apartment while residents were absent to survey their personal spaces and, having noticed something that raised his concerns, left pieces of paper with a message (stating for instance that rubbish should be disposed of or a room tidied up). In another account, a resident spoke of her food being pilfered from the shared kitchen – incidentally, one of the most frequent causes of conflict in a student apartment – which forced her to arrange a mini-pantry in her room, as she put it.

The territories of “Self” In the context of division into the personal and the common space, it would be worthwhile to recall Erving Goffman’s division into the stage (a locus that is visible to all) and the backstage.30 It would seem that it applies to student apartments, though in a peculiar fashion; the personal space is not necessarily “concealed” while the common space need not always be exposed to view. I think that in a student apartment the boundaries between the stage and backstage components become vague and blurred. For instance, when sharing a room with another person, one remains continually in the boundary area between the stage and the backstage. On the one hand, it is a space where one hides, while on the other such person is always observed and observes others in their turn. The kitchen is the most stage-like locus, where individual residents are the most exposed to cohabitants. The hallway or the bathroom are more behind the scenes, but in the latter, though shielded from view, one is still controlled by others – not in terms of actions themselves but in terms of time spent there, the amount of water used, or the tidy or untidy state in which the bathroom is left. Interestingly enough, bathrooms and laundry racks were a leading theme in the images we received.

Goffman also introduced the category of territories of “the Self,” which demarcate areas that an individual is entitled to claim as theirs. These include: 1) personal space (which must not be violated by others under any circumstances); 2) the stall - an enclosed compartment or place; 3) use space; 4) the turn, place in an order of sequence; 5) the sheath (skin and clothing); 6) possessional territory (objects identified with the individual and surrounding that individual, regardless of where they are); 7) information preserve (set of facts E. Goffman, Człowiek w teatrze życia codziennego, Warszawa 2000, pp. 135-167.

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relating to the person which is subject to control and regulation); 8) conversational preserve (meaning the right to exercise control over who may engage in a conversation with the individual).31 In a student apartment, each of those territories is indeed present in one way or another, but in that space the boundaries are fluid. Consequently, daily strategies of managing such territories in that singular, personal-common space are more intense. Personal space – just as the conversational preserve – may be infringed by the visits of guests who are not known to all, housemates or the landlord. As for the turn, the schedule of chores may be arranged but the use of bathroom can hardly be agreed with prior notice. Violations of the possessional space occur as well, as in the case of conflicts concerning food supplies or use of private objects.

The co-sharing mentioned in the title represents a category distinguished in our project in the course of analyses of the visual material. The photographs assigned to the category show mainly various visualization of the kitchen, a site that students most frequently identify with a common space. It is indeed a particular area in a student apartment. Apart from functional, shared use, it is a very often a place where residents meet during the day (to talk, watch films or cook). The bathroom or the hallway are co-shared as well but they provide no meeting place, being an area that should be “exchanged.”

The informatorium and multi-person use The above “co-sharing” category comprises two subcategories: the “informatorium” as well as places and objects that are subject to “multi-person use.” The images classified as the “informatoria” depict communications written by students to their cohabitants. The fridge is the most frequently employed notice board, where residents affix cleaning schedules, post pleasant notes, or commentaries to current affairs of the household. In extreme cases (as it follows from collected anecdotal accounts) this is the only means of communication between flatmates. The second distinguished category, i.e. “multi-person use,” encompasses photographs of the kitchen with its appliances as well as pictures of other items (drying racks, vacuum cleaners, sweepers), which in a student apartment serve all its inhabitants.

One should also note that the common space may be divided in particular interiors depending on whether a room is inhabited by one or two persons. It is also vital whether the other individual in the room is one’s partner or friend.

The layouts of apartments (that participants were requested to make) demonstrate that for people living separately, the common/family space is located in H. Jakubowska, Socjologia ciała, Poznań 2009, pp. 177-179.

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Photo 5. Informatorium

Photo 6. Informatorium. Cleaning schedule

the kitchen, whereas when a room is shared, the personal space is reduced and the common and personal areas function within a shared room. Still, there can be no doubt that students take that division into consideration and, despite the fact that the more or less personal areas are a problematic and negotiable issue in student apartments, the emoticons used in the layouts (cosy, peaceful, etc.) shows that looking for, sustaining and designating private spheres is one of the ways of tackling life in a student apartment.

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Photo 7. Multi-person use

Together or separately?

In regards to this issue, I would like to quote an account of a female student taking part in the project. She had come to Poznań from another locality, and throughout her stay there, she continued to live with people she did not know. The people in question lived under one roof but each functioned utterly separately. Wishing to use the common space, cohabitants would wait until it was vacated by another. The student decided to integrate the residents and managed to do so, as their meeting was quite successful. However, the usual mode of habitation was soon resumed.

This example is rather an exception. The student herself did not feel comfortable having to maintain such a relationship with the flatmates, as by and large students do expect a certain amount of being together, minimal though it may be. In a number of cases, one noted considerable care taken to foster a community. It so happened that our project coincided in part with the particularly familial Christmas season; the latter was celebrated in a way in several apartments by hanging Christmas decorations or putting up trees in one form or another. This is an explicit indication that there is a need to create some semblance of family life in student apartments. On the other hand, the highly individualized lifestyle of students – many of them work as well as study – make that “family life” or peer integration a challenge.

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Paula Michalska Personal items in a student apartment.

Mobility, provisionality and familiarization One of the major challenges for a student who has just moved into a rented apartment is getting used to new accommodation, becoming familiar with their room: a new place in which they will now sleep, eat, learn and spend leisure time. Creating a personal space there to ensure that everyday needs are catered for in the most convenient way is a crucial element of the process. Students appreciate spatial mobility, which is why they approach the apartment in terms of temporary stay. However, mobility invariably disrupts the sense of comfort and safety which is characteristic of everyday life in one’s family home.

Students relocating to other cities confront a serious problem, namely how to subordinate the existing space to one’s daily rituals, in other words regimes sustaining their everyday life.32 The manner in which apartments are arranged by students are for the most part original and seldom seen in ordinary residential interiors. Due to the mobile lifestyle (frequent moves) they opt for cheap, simple, and yet extraordinarily ingenious arrangements. Also, they often have to face certain limitations, e.g. conditions laid down by the landlord in the contract, shortage of means (tools or skills needed in renovations and repairs) or funds. The “familiarization” of a room – making it one’s own – boils down to furnishing it with personal objects of everyday use, whose main task is to create an impression of privacy, emulate the atmosphere of family home, reflect the personality of the inhabitant. Consequently, this text takes a closer look at the personal effects in student apartments or, more specifically, the relationship with their users in the context of mobility, provisionality and familiarization. The analysis focuses chiefly on the visual material obtained in the course of “The Students’ Flat Project.”

The junk and the shell The furniture in the apartments rented by students is for the most part old, too large, heavy and disproportionate with respect to the dimensions of the room.

At times, it is in poor repair, often clashes with the decor or even happens to be too ugly to look at. One of the devices employed by students to render it more visually attractive is to cover it with a shell of personal items. The dresser dating A term coined by Marek Krajewski in M. Krajewski, Dzisiaj jak wczoraj, jutro jak dziś.

Codzienność, przedmioty i reżimy podtrzymujące, in M. Bogunia-Borowska (ed.), Barwy codzienności. Analiza socjologiczna, Warszawa 2009, p. 181.

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Photo 8. The junk and the shell

back to socialist Poland in Kasia’s apartment was anything but appealing (bland colour, substantial size and unfashionable shape) and proved utterly impractical with its small drawers, sliding-glass compartments and drinks cabinet.33 Its shelves were filled by the occupant with her favourite books, arranged according to her preferred order. By these simple means, the colourful spines of the books lent warmth to a piece of furniture from the bygone era and at the same time made it possible to make it one’s own, by establishing a relationship This publication features only a sample of the collected visual material; also, we are able to publish all photographs taken into account while drafting this text. The material in question is nevertheless available on the project’s website.

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Photo 9. The junk and the shell

with Kasia’s personal items. However, the sensation does not stem solely from a bond with space mediated by objects, but from an interaction with those, from performance of everyday actions. Placing one’s effects somewhere and sorting them into individual patterns, thus introducing an order in the existing chaos, is closely associated with the sequences of activities undertaken daily (such as going through required reading).34 Bed. The territory and the object Judging by the number of submitted photographs, beds and futons/mattresses are the most important piece of furniture in a student apartment. In the project, these were referred to as “student’s headquarters.” It follows from the interviews and schedules kept by project participants that the bed does not function only as a place to sleep; it is there that they most often learn, eat, read, watch films on a laptop, or spend time talking with friends. In view of its multiple function, it is understandable that a bed should first of all be comfortable. The visual material collected in the project reveals that in most student apartments there are colourful bedspreads, soft blankets and patterned cushions placed on the bed. Sometimes, as in Miłosz’s apartment, they are perfectly matched with the dominant colour in the apartment (blue) or, as in Marta’s case, with the recurring patterns (black-and-white stripes). Elsewhere, e.g. in Zuza’s apartment, they are intended as an interesting and original element of the decor. Occasionally, for example in the apartment where Kasia T. lived, students do not attach any importance to aesthetic qualities, being concerned only M. Krajewski, Dzisiaj jak wczoraj..., pp. 183-184.

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Photo 10. Bed – the territory of “Self”

with the practicality of objects. Still, in most cases, the cushions and blankets on beds and mattresses serve to generate a warm and cosy atmosphere in the room – again a shell of a kind which made the personal space manifest the personality of the occupant at the same time.

Life on/in boxes Throughout their studies, most students change accommodation several times.

The interviews demonstrate that young people most often rent an apartment for the entire (academic) year, moving out already in late June having passed exams to return to their family homes for the three-month holiday. Then, they return in late September – early October to find a new apartment or room to rent.

Thus students think about items they need in terms of quick packing/unpacking or easy assembly/disassembly. Collected visual material demonstrates that cardboard boxes are indispensable furnishings of student apartments.

They are intended only as a provisional solution (for the move), but in the apartments rented by students that provisional state endures for several years. The boxes today are not chosen at random; they do possess some aesthetic quality and may be additionally adorned by students themselves and hence function as furniture. One could therefore conclude that they assume the role of objects thanks to which the regimes sustaining student’s everyday life are enacted.

Their task is to “maintain the viability of mobility channels in places of everyday

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Photo 11. Life in boxes

life.”35 In other words, they serve to preserve order in the relationship between object of everyday use and the residential space, not only to facilitate relocation but also to ensure easy access to personal items.36 Cardboard fruit crates in Helena’s apartment serves as cupboards in which she keeps props and costume accessories. Scattered chaotically throughout the apartment, the objects would have become “lumber.”37 The fact that they have been put into boxes and sorted confirms how important the aforesaid regimes are in the provisional circumstances. However, the form of the crates makes the contents visible at all times, both to the owner and the guest who visit her in her room. The visibility and the easy access to items stored in the boxes creates a situation where the former are constantly within reach, convenient and always ready to be used.38 Consequently, they afford a sense of comfort which is invariably associated with a feeling of “being at home,”39 although they may simultaneously perform an aestheticizing function. The cardboard boxes in the apartments where Zuza or Miłosz stayed are closed, while their shape, colour, and sized are strictly subordinated to the aesthetics of the apartment. As such, they ensure visual hygiene, by virtue of which everyday reality of an individual

Ibidem, p. 185 Ibidem.

37 Ibidem.

38 Ibidem, pp. 187-189.

39 Ibidem, p. 184.

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can be seen without looking at it. Thanks to such perceptive habituations,40 the occupants are capable of recalling where they have put the items they need. In this case, the basic task of the boxes is to hide the personal effects they contain.

The mosaic of icons Our investigations demonstrate that students’ treasures exposed to public view comprise chiefly of photographs taken with friends, postcards with sights of their favourite places, colourful images from magazines, tickets, leaflets and posters from a range of events. Collecting photographs of the cherished persons and sites as well as related emotional experience results from the need to be surrounded with images that are well known to one, connote a particular frame of mind or mood. This measure seeks to make a strange place more pleasant to commune with, more familiar. An interesting way of adapting a novel space is to attach the pictures to a piece of cord with a clothes peg. This method has long been employed by students, probably due to the “pact of inviolability of the walls” into which students and landlords enter. In order to circumvent it, students also resort to other means, such as collages affixed to the walls by means of Scotch tape. These carefully composed patchworks of imagery are used mainly to mark the new place with one’s own memories and the associated emotions and feelings. Interestingly, that kind of a “materialized desktop” or “mosaic of icons” (resembling the pattern of images in a computer folder or online image-sharing platforms), a wall decorated with photographs, prints or posters can be seen in almost all pictures documenting student apartments.

The mosaics are also depictive of the occupant, informing guests about their favourite books, music genres or films, their tastes in short. In Ada’s apartment, the very door to her room speaks volumes of the occupant, being covered with representations of Japanese stars of j-rock. Their function is two-fold in fact, as they to cover the glass pane in the door to ensure a sense of privacy. On the other hand, the mosaic in Szczepan’s apartment is first and foremost a decoration, given the careful composition and the aspiration to achieve order through asymmetry.

Furnished with light Yet another interesting means to add warmth to the interiors of student apartments are light arrangements. Remarkable effects may be easily and inexpensively obtained using colourful bulbs, openwork curtains, originally shaped or patterned shades, or use of other sources of illumination, such as tree lights or Ibidem, p. 186.

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Photo 12. The mosaic of icons

party balls. Szczepan’s room is filled by violet-blue semi-darkness, which gives way to constantly changing extravaganza of pulsing and flickering patches of light. Thus the appearance of the walls may be temporarily, magically transformed and created ever anew, depending on the mood of the occupant, although no permanent changes take place in the apartment. A different solution was applied in the apartment of Ewelina, Monika and Ola, to make the room more attractive and warmer. The spherical paper shade hanging from the ceiling is covered by a fine floral pattern, and the light casts curious shadows on the walls. In most student apartments one notices that colourful lights of the kind used on Christmas trees have been hung on furniture, and they provide an allyear rather than just seasonal decoration.

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Photo 13. The moisaic of memories

Photo 14. Furnished with light

Conclusions Based on the presented visual material, one may conclude that students, devising their own ways of arranging apartments they rent, have developed an effective method through which they are familiarized and personalized. It is worth noting that in their arrangements, young people today place a considerable emphasis on the aesthetic value of objects with which they surround themselves. Due to

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the temporariness of their habitation, the items play a decisive role in expressing one’s “self” and shaping individual regimes which sustain everyday life. These two dominant factors, i.e. mobility and provisionality, largely determine the particular “aesthetics of mobility” that students employ. Simultaneously, they follow current fashions, utilize contemporary visual codes known for instance from commercials, etc. Still, those trends are always filtered in some way, as students opt for items which are cheap and easy to maintain, serve a variety of functions and possess minimalist characteristics. Hence one often encounters identical, “corporate” furnishings in student apartments: lKEA laptop tables, jars – mementoes of home-made dinners – which they put to various uses (chiefly as a decoration) or coat hangers that substitute for a wardrobe. Social media contribute substantially to the aesthetics: the apartments and the objects have to be both comfortable, pleasing to the eye and original, so that their pictures may be readily publicized on one’s wall or profile.

Aleksandra Wachowiak “Sharing” the everyday. Mobile technologies, social media, and creation of basic reality since its very beginnings, photography served to document, capture and create reality. Technological advances exerted an impact on its social and cultural uses as well. When one compares analogue and digital photography, particularly the most recent form of the latter, i.e. mobile photography, significant differences in the usage of images and its ramifications become readily apparent. One of the crucial elements in understanding the social and cultural role of analogue photography is its materiality, which “translates the abstract and representational ‘photography’ into ‘photographs’ as objects that exist in time and space,”41 that are physically present, palpable in the real world, to put it in the simplest of terms. Digital photography, especially its mobile variety, precludes it since it exists only in the virtual domain.

The technological capacities of analogue photography and its limitations most of all, caused the amateur photographer to focus more on the object they wished to capture. Spontaneity used to be hampered by the unwieldy cameras, long exposures or the number of frames shot at once; the process of photographing would begin before the photosensitive material was exposed.

The mode in which the photographer proceeds may be considered in line with E. Edwards, J. Hart, Fotografie jako przedmioty. Wprowadzenie, transl. M. Frąckowiak, in M. Frąckowiak, K. Olechnicki (eds), Badania wizualne w działaniu. Antologia tekstów, Warszawa 2011, p. 256.

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Schütz’s concept of action which is construed as “human conduct as an ongoing process which is devised by the actor in advance, that is, which is based upon a preconceived project. The term ‘act’ shall designate the outcome of this ongoing process, that is, the accomplished action. […] action is the fulfilment of preconceived activity.”42 Pressing the shutter would be an act that is preceded by the performance of planning the frame. The distinction is quite significant since working (act) is irrevocable while in the course of performance the process may be cancelled and restarted.43 Photographs as physical objects are approached differently than images captured by means of mobile technologies. In the main, analogue photographs depict major family events, such as weddings, christenings or communions, as well as holidays. They record that which is worth remembering, times and places we would like to return to. Thus everyone has framed pictures or thick photo albums at home, which represent a private collection of memories. Such a notion of photography, both as an object and a form of action, makes it special, uncommon, even extraordinary.

This is not the case with mobile photography. In the study entitled Badanie fotoblogów jako badanie codzienności, Krzysztof Olechnicki demonstrates how mass use affects the choice of objects as well as the mode in which they are captured, and therefore the socio-cultural factor in photography.44 Thanks to mobile technologies and social media, users have the ability to share any experience with others at any given time and place. Globalization and widespread use resulted in trivialization of photography in that one photographs things that are trite and mundane, devoid of depth and aesthetic quality. It is nevertheless a form of enacting one’s presence here and now in the virtual space. The user, as a “wide-awake man [...] is primarily interested in that sector of the world of his everyday life which is within his scope and which is centred in space and time around himself. The place which my body occupies within the world, my actual Here, is the starting point from which I take my bearing in space.”45 Thus an individual communicates themselves to others. Sharing46 the everyday via social media has become both a new form of communication and a new mode of relating to reality. No conversation is required to know what is happening in the lives of others; it suffices to visit the profile of a given person to find the relevant information. On the other hand, the awareness that we are being ob A. Schütz, O wielości światów. Szkice z socjologii fenomenologicznej, transl. B. Jabłońska, Kraków 2008, p. 13.

43 Ibidem, p. 25.

44 K. Olechnicki Badanie fotoblogów jako badanie codzienności, in M. Bogunia-Borowska (ed.), Barwy codzienności. Analiza socjologiczna, Warszawa 2009, s. 342.

45 A. Schutz, O wielości światów..., p. 29.

46 http://www.pablik.pl/slownik/index.php/4537/szerowac.html [21.05.2017].

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served compels us to employ fitting means to publicize that reality. “The world of daily life [...] is an intersubjective world, […] I work […]upon my fellow-men, induced by them to act and inducing them to react. […] my performed acts may motivate the other to react and vice versa.”47 When posting a particular image or textual content, I share a moment and an impression anticipating a response, a comment or a like, doing likewise with respect to others. Users in the live present experience current sensations and emotions that are not reflected on nor reminisced. That which is taking place is what counts.

Photo 15. Activities. Watching

Photo 16. Activities. Reading

The participants in our project took pictures to help us capture their everyday life. The most straightforward means to do so was to use mobile technologies.

Most images showed certain activities as they were being performed, e.g. preparing food, reading books, or watching films on a laptop.

First and foremost, the pictures retain the aesthetics of mobile photography and could readily be posted on social media. However, the participants took A. Schutz, O wielości światów…, pp. 25-26.

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care not to go beyond a certain limit to protect their privacy, revealing to others as much as they consider appropriate or worth showing. Although the presence of a person in the photograph seems crucial, the face remains anonymous in a majority of cases. This is perhaps due to the fact that participants had been informed beforehand that their pictures would be published but could not fully control the form in which they were published, as it often happens with images posted online. Consequently, for fear of an unknown viewer, one strives to keep the visual content and manner of representation in check. Although participants tried to capture reality “live,” a certain creative component was indeed present, as may be seen in the poses or combinations of content (watching films) with a commentary (“relaxing”). Arranging objects depicted in the photograph was another method; one senses the presence of people in the vicinity, but they are not included in the frame.

Photo 17. Presence

Without doubt, social media have contributed to the desire to make our everyday and ordinary activities more visually compelling, mundane though they are, e.g. preparing a meal or reading a book. This aesthetic processing that is characteristic of mobile media is also employed when depicting the results of our actions; it has to be stated, however, that social media have made photographing commonplace creations, such as meals, a hugely widespread practice.

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Photo 18. Students’ food porn

Photo 19. Students’ food porn

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Summary “The Students’ Flat Project.”

Mobile Media and Educational Research Workshop Method The aim of this text is twofold. Firstly, it presents the outcomes of an educational research project, carried out with participation of cultural studies students in Poznań as part of the grant entitled Mobility: Media, Urban Practices and Students’ Culture.

The project launched in autumn 2015 during a course in animation methods involving three groups of students; its preliminary results were communicated in May 2016 at the seminar Visual Methods in Mobile Media Research. Secondly and more importantly, the text sets out to outline a type of research where students are involved, thus drawing attention to a practice of educational research, which integrates their effort to solve a problem with acquisition of basic qualitative study skills that rely on action and collaboration.

Keywords: mobility, students’ culture, everyday life, participatory action research Słowa kluczowe: mobilność, kultura studencka, życie codzienne, partycypacyjne badania w działaniu

From saturation of media to saturation of data

Katarzyna Kopecka-Piech University of Wrocław Institute of Journalism and Social Communication

Media Saturation as a Techno-Social Phenomenon.

Selected Examples of Smartphonisation in Social Life 1. Media saturation – metatheory and definitions In their assumptions, metatheoretical deliberations consist in systematising and striving for general elucidation.1 Metatheories are “general theoretical constructs resting in part upon empirical evidence, but which are not empirically verifiable in their entirety. Their function is rather to provide a structure to which concrete research can be directed [...].”2 Due to critical analysis of previous theories and concepts, subsequent directions in which to explore a phenomenon are determined. Metatheoretical studies combined with empirical research provide the foundation for the development of theory. Here, reflection will focus on selected elements of medium theory or, more broadly, media ecology and the concept of mediatization, both of which reveal a gap in the body of knowledge and demarcate the scope of further theoretical and empirical investigations concerned with media saturation.

Medium theory, being a part of the school of media ecology, represents one of the chief currents that yielded the concept of mediatization.3 In media ecology, media are environments which, depending on the alternative perspectives of hard and soft determinism, exert an impact or contribute to the impact on numerous spheres of human life. Although adherents of mediatization theory disclaim media determinism, the ecological and mediatization-derived F. Krotz, Neue Theorien entwickeln. Eine Einführung in die Grounded Theory, die heuristische Sozialforschung und die Ethnographie anhand von Beispielen aus der Kommunikationsforschung, Cologne 2005, after A. Hepp, Cultures of Mediatization, Cambridge – Malden 2013.

2 A. Hepp, Cultures of Mediatization, Cambridge – Malden 2013, p. 49.

3 K. Lundby, Mediatization of Communication, in K. Lundby (ed.), Mediatization of communication, Berlin – Boston 2014, p. 11.

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approaches should be treated as complementary rather than separate paradigms. Neil Postman, one of the founding fathers of media ecology, stated the following about its proponents: [...] we were not simply interested in media, but in the ways in which the interaction between media and human beings give a culture its character and, one might say, help a culture to maintain symbolic balance.4

Culture emerges within the bounds of particular media technology5 – or rather in the circumstances of media convergence6 where multiple conjunctions of technology occur – and develops within its framework. Technology constitutes the environment of interaction and the consequent mediatization.

The theoretical and methodological challenge lies in capturing the dimensions, layers, and levels of mediatization. Since the environment displays specific traits and magnitudes, one may attempt to establish the parameters of mediatization. It does possess quantitative and qualitative properties, also those which pertain to the proportions and nature of technological presence in a facility, space, process or sphere. The saturation mechanism relies on infiltration as technology penetrates into daily lives of the users. Media technology insinuates itself into a domain or process, reaches a certain level and acquires particular characteristics.

A question thus arises: how does that happen? What does the mechanism or mechanisms of saturation consist in? It appears to be a process, or rather a metaprocess,7 an exceedingly complex one which hinges on at least two concerted elements: the specificity of the medium (its infrastructural make-up, construction and design of the device, including affordances,8 functional and content-related properties) and the specificity of relations between complete mediatic entities, substantive content, and actions. Thus one arrives at a state where mediatization becomes feasible. In its turn, mediatization is a bilateral process. Culture and the social reality are shaped by media due to technological saturation, while simultaneous changes in culture and society trigger transformations of the media and, consequently, fluctuations in their saturation.

N. Postman, The Humanism of Media Ecology, “Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association” 1/2000, pp. 10-11.

5 Ibidem.

6 On the various facets of convergence see H. Jenkins, Kultura konwergencji. Zderzenie starych i nowych mediów, transl. M. Bernatowicz, M. Filiciak, Warszawa 2007; K. Kopecka-Piech, Leksykon konwergencji mediów, Kraków 2015.

7 ”[...] conceptual constructions with the aid of which we deal with generalized processes of change.” A. Hepp, Cultures of Mediatization, p. 47.

8 K. Kopecka-Piech, Afordancje mediów mobilnych, in M. Sokołowski (ed.), Nowe media.

Wyzwania współczesności, Olsztyn 2013.

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Saturation owes to the presence of media infrastructure, devices and contents within facilities and spaces,9 as well as processes carried out by means of media technology. In view of its two-fold, i.e. structural and processual nature, one can distinguish structural (or technological) and processual saturation. The former denotes permeation of a given facility, site, space and as a result social realms and spheres of human life with media technology, which both conditions and transforms given facility, site, space and as a result social realms and spheres of human life, yet it yields to their influence at the same time. The latter describes saturation with technologically mediated processes, actions, undertakings, and activities in which users engage while employing media technologies.10

Structural penetration of media technology – physical, digital, and mixed alike11 – followed by saturation of the human environment and the processes taking place there is characterized by considerable complexity. It functions at numerous levels simultaneously, from physical infrastructure and material infiltration with devices, through digital software which furnishes facilities and spaces with new dimensions, chiefly interactive ones, to content which renders substance or meaning to human surroundings and apparatus. Saturation demonstrates particular quantifiable attributes (degree and spectrum), as well as qualitative traits, relating to transformative potential for instance. Thus, media saturation may be considered one of the key parameters of mediatization.12 The hybrid nature of saturation consists principally in its being a techno-social, techno-cultural, and techno-economic phenomenon. Penetration and saturation involves diverse determinants and entails multifaceted outcomes which overlap and intertwine in the mediatization processes.13 Due to its quantitative and qualitative traits, saturation is an important aspect, and at times a prerequisite of mediatization in its particular variants: it contributes to the shape of culture while being reciprocally moulded by the latter, it is a building block of the social worlds while owing some of its structure to those, it constitutes a response to the market situation and has a bearing on it as well.

9 On the saturation of space cf. K. Kopecka-Piech, Wymiary i skutki saturacji medialnej w przestrzeniach otwartych i zamkniętych na przykładzie analiz centrum handlowego Sky Tower i projektu P.I.W.O., “Studia Medioznawcze” 3/2015.

10 The definitions cited here originate from a conference paper: K. Kopecka-Piech, Nowe technologie a saturacja medialna, IV Kongres Polskiego Towarzystwa Komunikacji Społecznej, Komunikowanie społeczne w dobie nowych technologii, Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, Poznań 15-17.09.2017.

11 K. Kopecka-Piech, Converging Media Spaces: Introducing an Emergent Field of Studies, “Studia Humanistyczne AGH” 3/2012.

12 K. Lundby, Mediatization of Communication, p. 20.

13 It should be presumed that mediatization is inherently a two-way transformation. Such a standpoint is adopted by e.g. Knut Lundby (ibidem). More broadly on the dimensions of mediatization: K. Kopecka-Piech, Sport – od medialnego zapośredniczenia do mediatyzacji, “Kultura i Edukacja” 4/2012.

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2. Mobile media saturation as evinced by smartphonization of social life The above theoretical frame of reference enables preliminary analysis of cases.

The aim therefore, is not only to assess the phenomenon from a theoretical standpoint but also to obtain its empirical picture and, if possible, determine the nature of saturation. In view of the dynamic development of mobile media in terms of quantity and quality, as well as their importance in contemporary daily life, further analyses will focus on these very media.

Mobile media, meaning communication devices such as mobile phones and smartphones, tablets, notebooks and laptop computers, appliances enabling access to content, such as portable players (for music or films), radios, mini-TVs, gaming pads; handheld devices used in process management (e.g. in logistics); recording devices: video and photographic cameras, voice recorders; wearable technologies (smartwatches, bands, trackers, pulse monitors, motion sensors), media technologies coupled with drones and other means of conveyance as well as other “technologies in motion” fill our immediate and more remote surroundings as well as everyday activities. One can be easily equipped with such devices since they are readily portable and present no encumbrance in transportation or use. Due to convergence, miniaturization and personalization, they increasingly accompany people in various situations. Consequently, they are capable of intense saturation and their number rises, with a steadily growing range of novel technologies, applications and users. Further spheres of life, sectors of the economy, industries and communities discover new opportunities, solutions and markets associated with mobile media. Presence and utilization of those technologies transforms practices, generates new activities and shapes new patterns of behaviours.

From the standpoint of saturation, the smartphone is an interesting and a singularly important mobile medium, given its properties. It represents a multimedium, polymedium14 or convergent medium which thanks to multiple hardware functionalities and unlimited options of software functions – whose availability depends on user choices with respect to downloaded apps – effects saturation through multiple media-mediated processes. The numbers of smartphone users, as well as applications and their types increase all the time; smartphones fill the space of human life physically while mobile apps do likewise in the virtual domain. In purely physical terms, we are surrounded by measurable electromagnetic smog, whose proliferation owes not only to radiation 14 M. Madianou, D. Miller, Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia, London 2012.

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from smartphones or other mobile and stationary devices, but above all to the infrastructure which enables them to function (BSTs, Wi-Fi networks, Bluetooth hubs, etc.). In the economic domain, new markets have emerged, including mobile gaming, mobile commerce, and mobile advertising. On the other hand, adopting the standpoint of humanities, one observes smartphonization15 of society and culture. In the methodological approach employed here, smartphonization denotes mediatization that takes effect through use of smartphones.

Also, it follows from the above premises that it becomes possible due to adequate smartphone saturation in spaces, social worlds, and media-mediated processes, and thus in varied spheres of life. In order to fathom the mechanism of saturation, that is to say the manner in which saturation reaches a sufficient level and quality to bring about mediatization, one may take advantage of analysis relying on the two aforesaid parameters, namely structural and processual saturation. To make the categories operational, one needs to provide a context and define the scope of research as well as its target problem, given that the horizon of potential investigations and analysis is very broad.

For that end, preliminary studies will focus on everyday life of smartphone users, specifically on their leisure time spent with others in public establishments such as restaurants, bars, cafes and pubs. The question posed here concerns smartphonization or, in other words, saturation of the users’ social life outside their place of residence with that technology. Thanks to a more thorough examination of that aspect, it may become possible to provide a general characterization of the culture of social life in the age of smartphonization.

3. Structural saturation In this case, in order to determine structural saturation, one should define the specificity of the medium (the underlying infrastructure, its engineered properties, including functional capabilities, as well as content-related features). On the other hand, the extent and the degree of structural properties will rely on the quantifiable presence of technology in a given space. Smartphone saturation of social life of their users can be stated by examining how facilities and spaces in which social life takes place are infiltrated by smartphones.

First of all, one should underscore the infrastructural background of the technology. The coverage, or availability of telecoms services, also enabling 15 The term originates from and is most often employed in industry periodicals and commercial publications. More relevant information may be found in the reports by Monika Mikowska, author of the blog Jestem mobi, http://jestem.mobi/raporty/, e.g. Smartfonizacja w Polsce 2014 – najważniejsze liczby i infografika, http://jestem.mobi/2014/02/smartfonizacja-w-polsce2014-najwazniejsze-liczby-infografika/ [8.03.2017].

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internet access, is very extensive. GSM, 3G, LTE and other networks are available (at least as variants) throughout most of the country,16 which means they may be potentially taken advantage of at any time and place. Consequently, the use of smartphones has become a widespread, established practice, also in the course of social gatherings. This is not limited to calls or text and multimedia messaging. Since most devices have an integrated digital camera, one of the predominant activities is taking pictures, recording videos and instant publishing of what has been captured during such events, chiefly in social media, not infrequently with appended commentary. The footage and imagery is automatically and intuitively available via mobile apps of services such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube.

Bluetooth networks also contribute to structural saturation, as an exchange of contents takes place between smartphone users, including strangers who do not take part in the gathering but are present nearby. A number of apps enables detecting users who share similar interests. The situation is complicated, however, by a range of commercially-oriented activities, including extensive advertising, that take place via such devices while adapting the communication to their current location. Users of some apps (e.g. Foursquare) receive notifications about the presence of particular persons and offers, reviews, comments and recommendations when they visit restaurants and bars, for instance. In the space which surrounds them, there are multiple incentives to find out more and gain access to special offers by means of QR codes or other indicators of augmented reality. Also, mobile gaming becomes an ever greater challenge to traditional meetings, as playing a game or games can be what brings people together in the first place. Here, Pokémon Go provides an eloquent example; the game requires considerable mobility, therefore the location of such a meeting might change repeatedly over a short time. The essence of the meeting is in competition and gameplay based on augmented reality.

Furthermore, smartphones undergo structural expansion. The growing significance of selfies17 resulted in mass use of additional accessories: extendable poles, sticks, even drones. Amateur photography has become professionalized, which an increasing number of selfie enthusiasts cannot resist. Thus, smartphones come or can be equipped with further accessories, gadgets and addons, which enhances their saturating potency even more.18

Coverage maps for the current service provided may be found at e.g. https://all-ant.pl/ pl/i/Mapy-zasiegu-operatorow/27 [8.03.2017].

17 P. Frosh, The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory, and Kinesthetic Sociability.

“International Journal of Communication” 9/2015.

18 M. Castillo, Case Brings Modular Parts To Any iPhone, http://www.psfk.com/2016/05/ case-brings-modular-parts-to-any-iphone.html [8.03.2017].

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Public places dedicated to social meetings are highly saturated with other technologies, e.g. gaming systems, wall screens and TV units, as well as free WiFi access encouraging patrons to visit a place because it offers internet access, often enough at no charge. Wi-Fi or a hotspot are universally encountered at places where social meetings are arranged, though they go against their core idea: to furnish space for a direct exchange of communications, face-to-face encounters, an unmitigated presence with respect to another person. Obviously, such conditions are an advantage at meetings of a professional nature, facilitating access to information, enabling attractive and undemanding presentation of difficult content, or the opportunity to contact an absent person. Thus, coffee chain stores have become workplaces in the age of the internet for freelancers and independent professionals. At social meetings, saturation with internet technologies causes communication to be multiplied, which in turn induces a reverse action, namely desaturation.

Desaturation in a given space can proceed in the top-to-bottom fashion or in the opposite direction, depending on the subject that initiates it. In the first case, establishments offer no Wi-Fi on the premises or, less often, block mobile phone signal, with a view to encourage patrons to engage in direct conversations, without the interference of other forms of communication. Meanwhile, grassroots desaturation does not owe to an imposed block on mobile transmissions or unavailable service, but to a will of the patrons themselves, who decide not to make use of it. At times, they may be inspired or motivated to do so. For instance, certain establishments offer a free beverage to those who leave their phones with the barkeep for the duration of their visit in a pub or place it in a special locker.19 Though an advertising undertaking in all respects, Mastercard’s “Put the phone away and start talking”20 consisted nonetheless in suggesting to patrons of selected Warszawa restaurants that they deposit their phones in a special capsule on the table in order to focus exclusively on direct conversation. The capsule would measure the time, while participants received prizes. Still, the apparently desaturation-oriented initiative had a different aim such as to advertise Mastercard’s electronic wallet using NFC technology, encouraging people to switch from pay cards to phones. The example illustrates the hybrid and paradoxical nature of saturation, which due to its economic dimension brings about changes that are contrary to one’s intended goals.

19 E.g. Amstel Bulgaria, Wardrobes for Smartphones, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=OBDCYiYgB20 [8.03.2017].

20 A. Marciniak, Odkryć na nowo przyjemność rozmowy – bezcenne!, http://newsroom. mastercard.com/eu/pl/news-briefs/odkryc-na-nowo-przyjemnosc-rozmowy-bezcenne/ [8.03.

2017].

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4. Processual saturation Determination of processual saturation should seek to capture the unique relations between mediatic wholes, content, and specific actions of users that rely on technologically mediated processes. The processes saturate the surroundings and particular spheres of life. The extent and degree of saturation provide a quantitative reflection of the state of affairs.

Equipped with multiple subdevices and functions, a smartphone is the highest-level convergent device, and as such, it is capable of saturating a great number of processes thanks to which users perform daily activities and carry out numerous actions. Also, there are no limitations with respect to content, be it in terms of form (an entire range of multimedia) and substance (no thematic restrictions). Thus, in a hypothetical situation of a social gathering of smartphones users in a restaurant, it may be presumed that the devices saturate (to a varied degree, perhaps) social activity with multiple processes: interpersonal communication, exchange of data and information (relating to social, professional or business affairs), shopping, reviewing products and services, storing and distributing multimedia material, payment transaction and many other actions deriving from the nature of the meeting and participating individuals (some of whom may also wish to score points in a mobile game, whereas others will tackle some outstanding work using the available free time).

From the standpoint of outcomes, smartphone’s convergence and versatility promotes constant use that blurs previous temporal and spatial boundaries between duties (professional and familial) and pleasure (leisure time). The first consequence of the broad-ranging processual saturation of social gatherings (as well as time spent in the privacy of one’s home) is that “pure,” non-hybrid activities can no longer be unequivocally determined. This is associated with the ever more firmly established patterns of multitasking and multiscreening.

Communication processes become overlaid; direct conversations (e.g. in a restaurant, cafe or club) overlap with structures of mediated, multimedia and multilateral communication (involving persons who are not physically present at the meeting) in its synchronous and asynchronous forms. Due to effects produced by mechanisms of social media, the meetings may even become a public event that may be indirectly attended by all interested parties.

Here, the crux lies in the functionality of each smartphone, i.e. the ability to take photographs, record videos and instant publication of those, which reinforces the visual nature of that hybrid communication, and enhances the importance of aesthetic value of the communications. One of the prevalent trends that have emerged in social media (especially in Instagram) is photographing one’s own meal; with time, the latter practice has become the object

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of satire, parody and artistic interpretation characterized by a more serious, insight-seeking bias.21

Conclusions.

From saturation to mediatization Media saturation provides a basis for mediatization of particular provinces, areas and spheres of human life, since it affects the shape of the environment in which people function. The qualitative and quantitative features of that environment co-determine socio-cultural transformations as well as yield to their influence. Hence, one may ask about the essence of mediatization or more precisely smartphonization of social life that ensues from saturation with the technology and processes it mediates.

It may be asserted that today a smartphone is a device thanks to which social life does in fact take place. In a one-to-one and many-to-many communication, also via social media, people arrange meetings, reminisce on the events, discuss their aftermath, or continue the conversations. Also, social media expand the circle of participants to include those who are physically absent. Moreover, social life occurs online. However, given the important dimension of interpersonal contact inherent in a direct encounter with another person, mediatization means that they undergo substantial transformation. Social gatherings are thoroughly permeated by mediated processes which – by and large – bear hardly any relation to the meeting. Integrating particular mediated processes, the social encounters are hybrid events accompanied by other activities of everyday life. They are held in places that are highly saturated with technologies, media ones in particular, therefore only desaturation (initiated from above or taking source at the grassroots) can restore the meeting’s original configuration, where original means characteristic and typical of the era prior to smartphonization, albeit not necessarily intended by the participants. Admittedly, there may be situations where any unmediated mode of a physical encounter of persons with the purpose of communication is dismissed from the start, which translates into extreme, nearly total mediatization (smartphonization).22 On the other hand, attributing value to any form of social gathering, especially dating to the period from before smartphonization, may prove a trap which is best illustrated by journalistic or artistic takes on the issue, so intensely circulated in social media.

The critics of critics of media technologies argue their case referring to how we 21 L. Arroyo, Illustrating the Irony of Relationships in the Digital Age, http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/illustrating-the-irony-of-humanity-in-the-digital-era [8.03.2017] 22 The Great Japanese Retirement (documentary), BBC World News, 10.11.2013, http:// www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/n3csk761 [8.03.2017].

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used to ignore one another in the days before smartphones23 or discuss how the smartphone has replaced the ordinary newspaper.24 After all, the mechanisms of mediatization and media saturation tally well with McLuhan’s tetrad.25 What is more, they can hardly be considered a surprising development, being merely a new facet of the mediatic environment: ostensibly unexpected and yet quite predictable, in fact.

Summary Media Saturation as a Techno-Social Phenomenon.

Selected Examples of Smartphonisation in Social Life The paper discusses media saturation, in other words the extent to which media technologies are present in the environment of their users and processes in which they engage. In particular, the author focuses on smartphone-based communication, with the aim of capturing the complex, hybrid nature of media saturation. The first part is devoted to metatheoretical analyses whose purpose is in achieving structuration and elucidation of general phenomenon, thanks to which it can be defined and categorized.

At this stage, the author relies on theories and concepts originating from the domain of media studies that provide a basis for the concept of media saturation, i.e. the theory of medium and media ecology as well as mediatization theory. In the second part, an empirical characterization of the phenomenon is attempted. The author analyzes qualitative aspects of smartphone-related structural and processual saturation of the social life of users, demonstrating a hybrid, i.e. techno-social, techno-cultural, and technoeconomic nature of the phenomenon.

Keywords: media saturation, mobile media, mediatisation, smartphonisation, social life Słowa kluczowe: saturacja medialna, media mobilne, mediatyzacja, smartfonizacja, życie codzienne 23 K. Ashton, How People Ignored Each Other Before Smart Phones, https://www.facebook.com/kevinashton/photos/a.560757080717955.1073741828.330047810455551/62459 4911000838/?type=3 [8.03.2017].

24 H.L. Carral, Stop Saying Technology is Causing Social Isolation, https://digitalculturist. com/stop-saying-technology-is-causing-social-isolation-1e004de63a5e#.xwkjy46ym [8.03.2017].

25 K. Kopecka-Piech, Mobilne media miejskie, “Studia Medioznawcze” 3/2012.

Paweł Wieczorek SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Department of Media Studies

Algorithm as a Dealer of Compulsive Communication

Introduction We are moulded by Facebook, Google, Instagram, and YouTube. The Internet environment, originally created by the user, has been annexed by applications and algorithms cooperating within them. Every single selection of the medium through which the user receives and shares data unavoidably places him or her in the stream of automatically moderated channels or feeds. In effect, communication through applications becomes a substitute of selection, a dummy, because out of an apparently available variety, we only take what we are about to receive – messages and data chosen and based on our previous interests and searches. Thus, by taking advantage of the endless Internet resources, we limit ourselves to a circle which is only penetrated by what we allow to penetrate.

For example, the Facebook algorithm managing user tables shows the users less than half of entries posted by their friends and acquaintances. Thousands of algorithm criteria imitate the intelligent selection made by a human user. The automatic, machine, animator learns by tracking user activities while a human user massively consumes such artefacts.

My objective is to study the ways information is consumed within the network and find an answer to the following questions: Are we really helpless against machines? How to remain within the circle of friends and our favourite topics without being disconnected from new ideas or individuals? Or perhaps we are permanently entangled in the antinomy of either being your own self or being operated by a machine?

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1. From scrolling to selling Although technologizing and automation of communication are not recent phenomena and seem to be quite obvious parts of our everyday lives, the data concerning the level of infiltration in our lives by machinery may still take us by surprise. As an example, every fourth Pole remains online 24/7, 36% of the society are connected from 8 to 12 hours daily with 19% remaining online from 6 to 8 hours every day.1 It means that 80% of Poles stay connected to the web for at least 1/3 of the day (understood as 24 hours).

The network is the source for the majority of information about the world for many people. I am currently conducting research into the ways news is distributed through the Internet. Based on partial results of my study,2 I estimate that 66% of the respondents use Facebook as their source of information, up to 44% of participants receive information through a conversation or web messenger, while web sites are the source of news only for as little as 31% of individuals. It is evident that conversation or reading the news on web sites cannot compare to the content presented on Facebook.

I also asked about the mobile social media applications. The respondents check mainly Facebook and they do it many times a day (77%). The second largest medium, i.e. Snapchat, is used many times by barely 11% of the respondents.

Such great popularity of Facebook leads me to a conclusion that it has a decisive effect on the way the news is absorbed by its users. And what is more, it has influence on how its users perceive the world. It is an alarming phenomenon in the sense that information published on social media is not selected, or categorised by people. It does not present some of the posts and displays only those which guarantee the reader’s interest and engagement.

The social media algorithm classifies and associates user’s posts based on his or her behaviour. By tracking the human behaviours, the machine modifies its own actions. The algorithm is therefore dynamic and changes its decisions based on the choices made by the user. It is in fact a mirror distorting the image of its user. It distorts the image because it is based on user behaviours rather than intentions.

The more we use or visit Facebook, the better this alternative, algorithmic “Self” of the user learns. The posts do not wait for us – they are queued in a sequence when we start using the application.3 By interacting with the posts of other individuals, we teach the algorithm by providing it with a consider1 PWC, Connected living. Dlaczego ludzie są bardziej digital niż firmy?, 2017, https://www. pwc.pl/pl/publikacje/2017/connected-living.html [1.06.2017].

2 The survey was conducted on a sample of 554 polish individuals aged 18 to 35.

3 Some of the items on the user’s board – especially the second one – do not require any interaction, as they are assigned by the advertisement or sponsored content algorithm.

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able number of data. Therefore, it becomes more of the “Self.” The artificial “I” chooses for us what we are going to see on the Facebook board. It is responsible for presenting the content and its mix because “on Facebook’s news feeds, commercial messages are blended and mixed together with chatting, gossip, and personal opinions.”4 In practical terms, how does the algorithm affect the content of the News Feed? Let me start with the content-linked qualitative aspect. A Buzz Feed journalist, Ryan Broderick, created a profile where he did not identify any friends, or acquaintances. He initially liked the right-wing Republican National Committee. Following Facebook suggestions to like the sites and posts displayed on the News Feed, he was entering political extremisms deeper and deeper. In his article, the journalist said: “After three days, I started seeing white power memes and was asked to join a Vladimir Putin fan page. By Friday, my News Feed included an article from the Daily Stormer, an actual neo-Nazi website.”

Finishing, he provided the following conclusion: “After a week of poking around, liking things, sharing articles, and joining suggested groups, opening my News Feed is now like peering into an alternate reality.”5 Another Buzz Feed journalist, Mat Honan, conducted a similar experiment.

He used his profile for 48 hours to like everything that Facebook displayed and offered him. He described his experience in the following way: “My feed become a cavalcade of brands and politics and as I interacted with them, Facebook dutifully reported this to all my friends and followers” (therefore, he received queries from friends whether his profile had been hacked). Two days later, he summarised his test in the following way: “I’d added more than a thousand things to my Likes page – most of which were loathsome or at best banal.

By liking everything, I turned Facebook into a place where there was nothing I liked.”6 P. Fu, Ch. Wu, Y. Cho, What makes users share content on Facebook? Compatibility among psychological incentive, social capital focus, and content type, “Computers in Human Behavior” 67/2017, p. 24.

5 R. Broderick, I made a Facebook profile, started liking right-wing pages, and radicalized my News Feed in four days, 8.03.2017, “BuzzFeed,” https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/ i-made-a-facebook-profile-started-liking-right-wing-pages-an?utm_term=.laApdrJPk#.io4Dzr Gp6 [1.06.2017].

6 M. Honan, I liked everything I saw on Facebook for two days. Here’s what it did to me, 8.11.

2014, “Wired,” https://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook-for-twodays-heres-what-it-did-to-me/. A reverse experiment was conducted by the blogger Elan Morgan. She failed to like anything that appeared on her board for 2 weeks. She observed that she started to receive fewer advertising posts and more posts from friends. She therefore concluded: “I won’t be liking anything in the foreseeable future.” E. Morgan, I quit liking things on Facebook for two weeks. Here’s how it changed my view of humanity, 14.08.2014, “Medium,” https://medium.com/swlh/i-quit-liking-things-on-facebook-for-two-weeks-heres-how-it-chang ed-my-view-of-humanity-29b5102abace [1.06.2017].

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The other aspect of the algorithm operation can be dubbed as quantitative.

In August 2014, Tim Herrera, a journalist from “The Washington Post,” calculated that if his Facebook board had not been moderated by the algorithm, he would have seen 2,500 posts (including 1,900 1.9 thousand new ones) based on the observed sites and those posted by friends. What he saw, however, was only 1,400 of which half was older than one day. The algorithm concealed 1,800 new posts.7 But presenting what is of interest to us is only a secondary objective of the algorithm. It learns our behaviours and preferences, not to bring order to our News Feed. The most important lesson from this learning process is to sell advertising space not only on the Facebook sites but also outside Facebook.

Teaching the machine our behaviours is linked with profit from advertisers’ orders; the users are “sold” the advertisers who are potentially interested in a spreading adds to them.

Besides such obvious data as the place of residence, or gender, Facebook also offers the advertisers dozens of other criteria for “prey” selection such as data concerning actual political views, size of the current house or flat, house or car purchase plans, driving style, web browser type, credit or debit cards, possible payment problems, clothes sizes, period of year when the user is likely to shop more, interest in Christmas, Ramadan or Yom Kippur, entertainment patterns outside home and many other aspects of life.8 In short: hundreds of offer combinations for advertisers.

Information about the existence of algorithms reaches the society at large but it is not a common awareness. 63% of the US based Facebook users participating in the survey did not know that their News Feed is driven by an algorithm. They believed that if they cannot see posts from friends or pages, they probably missed them during quick scrolling or because they had rarely visited their own profile.9 Ignoring the existence of the algorithm has certain consequences. Facebook users come to false conclusions concerning the activity and relationships with their friends. There may be a situation where one user cannot see 7 T. Herrera, What Facebook doesn’t show you, 18.08.2014, “The Washington Post,” http:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/08/18/what-facebook-doesnt-showyou/ [1.06.2017].

8 C. Dewey, 98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads to you, “The Washington Post,” 19.08.2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/08/ 19/98-personal-data-points-that-facebook-uses-to-target-ads-to-you/?utm_term=.bf9688 123174 [1.06.2017].

9 M. Eslami, A. Rickman, K. Vaccaro, A. Aleyasen, A. Vuong, K. Karahalios, I always assumed that I wasn’t really that close to [her], presentation during the 33rd Annual ACM Conference, 2015, New York, USA, http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/papers/pdfs/Eslami_Algorithms_CHI15.pdf [1.06.

2017].

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posts by another user because they failed to comment on their entries. Such a passive observer may regard the friend as not using the portal, or even block viewing his own posts. Meanwhile, it was the algorithm that decided, based on a lack of reaction, that the posts from the friend are not of interest to the user and concealed them.10 Similar situations have already been a cause of misunderstandings.

In April 2017, a Polish psychologist, in one of his Facebook posts, expressed his outrage at the lack of empathy from the readers of his News Feed. He announced having posted two messages on Facebook earlier that day. The first post was a picture of a book which had a very funny title. The other one was published one hour later and concerned a charity funding. The first post had 70 likes, 28 shares and was commented 18 times. The second one got three likes (from event organisers); there were no comments and the link was not shared.

“I am not going to offend the intelligence of readers of my posts, nor will I draw conclusions for them,” wrote the offended author. The users tried to convince him that they had not seen the request for support for this honourable goal.

Many of them wrote: “The second post was not available for me,” “I also only got the funny one.” Some of them felt offended by the author’s outrage. Others came to a justifiable conclusion that the algorithm was responsible for the situation: “Notice please that Facebook shows the posts in a very selective manner,” “The algorithm has been exposed.”

2. More broadcast than medium The fact that the algorithm selects posts by various criteria influences not only the relationships between individuals but also affects professional editorial boards.

The most popular content shared on Facebook in Poland (as well as across the world) are funny pictures and films. In 2016, in comparison with 2015, posts concerning charity events for animals as well as official sites of brands and publications from bloggers grew in popularity. Local and world news are the fourth popular item on Facebook with respect to popularity and sharing (29%) in Poland.11 More on the consequences of the way the social media are used can be found in my paper: Walka algorytmu z użytkownikiem, czyli jak social media rządzą wpisami delivered during the IX Międzynarodowa Konferencja Naukowej Etyki Mediów [9th International Media Ethics Conference], Uniwersytet Papieski Jana Pawła II w Krakowie and Polskie Towarzystwo Komunikacji Społecznej, May 2015, Cracow. The text of the paper is pending publishing. At that time, I was much more skeptical with respect to the role of the algorithm; today I dispute the majority of the theses presented in my previous articles.

11 IRcenter, Social media 2016 – użytkownicy, March 2016, https://ircenter.com/socialmedia-2016-uzytkownicy/ [1.06.2017].

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Sharing news through social media is an indispensable part of the online news distribution and consumption. Such news sharing did not start with the coming of digital platforms. This phenomenon “predates the Internet, from conversations in the office to newspaper clippings sent through the postal service.”12 News sharing is the essence of what is also referred to as the hybrid media system. In this system, news journeys between the social and editorial media, between the professionals and amateurs.13 It has a major effect on the news itself: research shows that the way the information is used on the social media has influence on the choices and priorities of the editorial boards.14 This influence results in the algorithm having an effect later on editorial decisions as the professional media verify popularity on the social media. So, the news posted on the social media if read by the users is highly rated by the algorithm.

The professional media notice that, hang on to it or continue the topic. The circle is closed.

As extreme examples of the hybrid media system may be regarded as the news, which are created solely on the grounds of social media reports. The latest examples will include reports on the terrorist attack in Manchester on 22nd May 2017. Articles referring to the attack victims were to a large extent created based on the data found on the social media like Facebook and Twitter – from pictures to friends’ memoires.15 Making the article available on the social media closes the news loop: the texts, in another form, return to the source and may be used to create more articles which will again circulate around the endless media news spiral. The social media play an important role as a source of news and opinion – both for the users and the media. But is an algorithm a virtual editor and the social media are the informational media?

The algorithm is sometimes compared to an editor building a hierarchy of the content: “Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation.”16 In the opinion of some of the researchers, it makes the Face12 A. Hermida, F. Fletcher, D. Korell, D. Logan, Share, like, Recommend, “Journalism Studies” 13(5-6)/2012, p. 817. Also see I. Himelboim, S. McCreery, M. Smith, Birds of a feather tweet together: Integrating network and content analyses to examine cross-ideology exposure on Twitter, “Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication” 18(2)/2013, pp. 40-60.

13 A. Chadwick, The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power, Oxford 2013.

14 F. Cherubini, R.K. Nielsen, Editorial Analytics: How News Media are Developing and Using Audience Data and Metrics, 2016, https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/ editorial-analytics-how-news-media-are-developing-and-using-audience-data-and-metrics [1.06.2017].

15 E.g. Who are the victims of the Manchester terror attack? 22.05.2017, “The Telegraph,” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/23/victims-manchester-terror-attack/ [1.06.2017].

16 M. Nunez, Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News, 5.09.2016, “Gizmodo,” http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppress ed-conser-1775461006 [1.06.2017].

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book board a genuine journalist: “Facebook orders and ranks news information, which is doing the work of journalism [...]. Editing, curating, sorting, and ranking of news information are all part of journalism and Facebook is making these decisions.”17 I do not agree with this because I believe that the very act of choosing and rank ordering the sequences of posts by the algorithms is rather an imitation of the work of the traditional media which employ real people. Cutting and building a hierarchy of information solely on the grounds of recipient (reader) selections eliminates completely the work of the journalists and editors. Although the traditional media create content based on broadly understood interests of the readers, they also reach for crucial information which goes beyond a reader’s interest. They find and verify (unless something goes wrong occasionally) and explain events and then deliver information about them in the form absorbable to the users. Such decisions are made by people who want to present something to the recipients and who do not want to be a mere reflection of the reader’s, viewer’s, or listener’s expectations.

Additionally, media are team work. After the article on a given subject has been written (let me use a comparison to the written media, although on TV and the radio, the system is similar) it is read by the editor, who will independently, upon his or her discretion change the text or identify the fragments which need to be made more precise, or which are too long, unnecessary, or simply boring. Then the editor approves the journalist’s material for publishing.

The posts on the social media are resultant of accidental opinions of individuals; a resultant which does not have the power of messages published by the opinion-making media backed by a team work authority and (by default, not always adequate) professionalism. In the social media, authors build and publish messages as they please. In other words: mass media is team work, while social media is individual work.

In my opinion, the nature of the social media is closer to the dictionary definition of the “media.” Let me take a look into the Oxford Dictionary and the definition of the word which is as follows: “Usually the media treated as singular or plural. The main means of mass communication (broadcasting, publishing, and the Internet).” The key thing is the “means of mass communication.” It is the term describing the manner, technique and not the organisational culture.

The word “means,” in its common sense, is erroneously suggesting that we are dealing with something which is similar to a newspaper or TV. While in reality, it is a medium in literal terms, i.e. something that broadcasts something.

17 N. Jurgenson, Facebook: Fair and Balanced Cyborgology, 7.05.2015, “The Society Pages,” http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2015/05/07/facebook-fair-and-balanced/ [1.06.

2017]. Also see A. van Dalen, The algorithms behind the headlines, “Journalism Practice” 6(5-6)/ 2012, pp. 648-658.

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3. Whoever and whatever As I mentioned above, sharing is the most common activity on the social media.

Such use results mainly in generating secondary content. Therefore, the social media are full of opinions concerning the news and opinions about the opinions because the opinion posts contain emotions. In the hunt for mind-boggling news, anything that looks anyhow and is posted by anybody, may be regarded as an important piece of information which phenomenon was observed during the Donald Trump campaign after fake news had appeared. How could this be prevented?

In 2016, in response to the critical opinion concerning automatic news selection, Facebook introduced a hybrid approach for post management employing people in addition to algorithms. Those curators were to control the content of the trending news section.18 However, as soon as August 2016, after a series of complaints that the human curators concealed conservative content, Facebook resigned from this solution and switched to a more algorithmically driven process to enable “our team to make fewer individual decisions about topics.”19 The return to the algorithm opened up the path for a deluge of fake news during the presidential campaign in the USA: lack of curator’s supervision over the content posted on Facebook made the machine treatment of fake news as a priority much easier on Facebook.20 The spreading of this type of information is enhanced by the fact that 62% of U.S. adults get news on social media (in 2012: 49%).21 There was the news that Denzel Washington or Pope Francis supported Donald Trump or about the mysterious death of the FBI agent investigating the Hilary Clinton email leak. The authors of fake news, who ridiculed both the algorithm and the users, did not need to be rival’s agents or officers of enemy intelligence. The greatest turmoil was caused by the fake news which was created based on mercenary motives in Macedonia: the town of Veles was the home 18 S. Thielman, Facebook News Selection is in Hands of Editors Not Algorithms, Documents Show, “The Guardian,” 12.05.2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/12/ facebook-trending-news-leaked-documents-editor-guidelines [1.06.2017].

19 Also see: Facebook, An Update to Trending, 26.08.2016, https://newsroom.fb.com/ news/2016/08/search-fyi-an-update-to-trending/ [1.06.2017].

20 M. Isaac, Facebook, in Cross Hairs after Election, is Said to Question Its Influence, “The New York Times,” 12.11.2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/technology/face book-is-said-to-question-its-influence-in-election.html?_r=0; C. Silverman, Here’s Why Face book’s Trending Algorithm Keeps Promoting Fake News, “BuzzFeed,” 26.10.2016, https://www. buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/can-facebook-trending-fight-off-fake-news?utm_term=.ei0EMm Y2d#.omXlEwQD5 [1.06.2017].

21 J. Gottfried, E. Shaerer (Pew Research Center), News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016, 26.05.2016, http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-plat forms-2016/ [1.06.2017].

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for at least 140 US pro-Trump websites. The Guardian reporter described the events: they “Hired a half-dozen US-based writers to produce original content.

The Macedonians see a story elsewhere, write a sensationalised headline, and quickly post it to their site. Then they share it on Facebook.”22 It was all done by the shrewd Macedonians from Veles to make money on individual pieces of information up to even 3,00 USD a day: “The more people who click through from Facebook, the more money they earn from ads on their website.”23 Responsibility for the turmoil lies, to a large extent, on the news hierarchy built by the algorithms – one criterion considered was the popularity of the posts which was easy to acquire due to controversial and sensational content.

What exactly are the factors on the social media, not only on Facebook, that have influence on the algorithm decision to circulate a post among a broader audience?

4. Imminent surveillance How high YouTube will put a user’s video depends primarily on the cumulated time of the user’s presence on YouTube (which begins with watching a particular film), the time spent by a user watching a particular film and regularity of publishing keenly watched content on his/her channel.24 The Twitter algorithm works discreetly and applies the rule of chronological presentation of tweets sent by the observed individuals. In addition, it shows some of the posts liked by the observed individuals and recommends tweets on a “In case you missed it” or “People also read” basis. When looking for recommendations, Twitter considers its current character, image or video content, frequency of interactions, power of connection between the author and the recipient and user preferences so far.

In Instagram, a service owned by Facebook, the algorithms have been sequencing posts since March 2016. The introduction of an automated queue of displayed content was explained by the fact that an average user omitted 70% of entries on his or her feed. Therefore, the current algorithms provide them with the moments which are “of greatest interest for them.” These are the posts of the individuals whose pictures are regularly “liked” by the users, 22 D. Tynan, How Facebook powers money machines for obscure political ‘news’ sites, “The Guardian,” 24.08.2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/facebook-clickbait-political-news-sites-us-election-trump [1.06.2017].

23 Ibidem.

24 M. Gielen, J. Rosen, Reverse Engineering The YouTube Algorithm: Part I, 23.06.2016, http://www.tubefilter.com/2016/06/23/reverse-engineering-youtube-algorithm/; M. Gielen, Reverse Engineering The YouTube Algorithm: Part II, 16.02.2017, “Tubefilter,” http://www. tubefilter.com/2017/02/16/youtube-algorithm-reverse-engineering-part-ii/ [1.06.2017].

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whose profiles they view, who they exchange news with or who they know in real life.25 The introduction of the algorithm into Instagram in 2016 was encountered with a sharp response of some of the users. The internaut named Aleen Simms wrote: “Help. Today I got the algorithmic Instagram feed and I want to burn it to the ground. I hate it on Facebook, I hate it there,”26 and ATad-Sketchy complained: “Please make a way to switch view ability! I hate that I feel that Instagram decides what I should see. I don’t see posts anymore from close friends or small businesses.”27 Of course, Facebook is the largest social medium in the world with 1.28 billion users daily,28 the majority use mobile devices. The Facebook algorithm mechanisms are not as generally known as the application itself. They are difficult to identify as they operate without the user’s participation and are a strictly guarded secret; very often they are beyond the control of the sites which are owned by the mass media. It is known for certain that the algorithm structures the data primarily with an object to engage the users on Facebook. The point for the engaging is not only to increase the opportunities of presenting a user with the largest number of ads possible, but also to find out as much as possible about the preferences of a given individual – based on actions and interactions taking place on this social medium.

On Facebook, each type of post “has been assigned a numeric value by the News Feed ranking team and given a relevancy score by the algorithm.”29 For example, a video or an image are more important for the algorithm than the links and status updates. With regard to user actions, the important elements include the type of interaction (likes, comments, sharing and each of these activities has its own weight depending on the user’s effort put into a particular activity), individuals in interaction (degree of familiarity, undertaking joint other activities by the individuals), date of publishing a post, its popularity (even older posts with a number of comments and shares will be kept higher on the list), technical conditions (depending on the network throughput, there are more or less texts, or pictorial posts).30 25 A. Hutchinson, Inside the Instagram Algorithm, “SocialMediaToday,” 13.02.2017, http:// www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/inside-instagram-algorithm [1.06.2017].

26 User @Aleen on Twiter, https://twitter.com/aleen/status/739991951932461056, 7.06.

2016 [1.06.2017].

27 A comment on Instagram, See the Moments You Care About First, 2.06.2016, http:// blog.instagram.com/post/145322772067/160602-news [1.06.2017].

28 Facebook, Company info – statistics, https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/ (data concern the number of users as of March 2017) [1.06.2017].

29 E. Powers, My News Feed is Filtered?, “Digital Journalism” 27/2017, p. 4.

30 C. Sandvig, The Facebook “It’s Not Our Fault” Study, 7.05.2015, “Social Media Collective” (Microsoft Research lab), https://socialmediacollective.org/2015/05/07/the-facebook-its-notour-fault-study/; A. Hutchinson, How Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Works (and What’s

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It is obvious that Facebook tracks what we do inside it: in its application or site. What is less obvious though is the user being tracked outside the Facebook application: “While you’re logged onto Facebook [...] the network can see virtually every other website you visit.”31 Even when you are logged off “Facebook knows much of your browsing: it’s alerted every time you load a page with a ‘like’ or ‘share’ button, or an advertisement sourced from its Atlas network.”32 Therefore, Facebook knows “what you do on the rest of the internet outside of Facebook [...]. Many sites track this information via cookies [...] and Facebook reads those cookies and uses that information to serve up ads both on its site and on other websites.”33 For that reason, when browsing the Internet even without being logged into Facebook, we also teach it about us and we provide it with information about our interests. The knowledge about the mechanism is important because it makes us aware that there is no escape from providing Facebook with information about us. You are unable to tell whether the next page is not going to connect to Facebook to provide the next portion of data about yourself. The company has created its own universe and collects information about you in an imminent manner to present potential advertisers with the best possible profiled and described recipient (in which it strongly competes with Google).

Therefore, what can each user do in order not to give in to such an overwhelming power of the algorithm?

5. Closed in chambers Some of the users attempted (although ineffectively) to appeal to Facebook: “I would like to keep up with all of my friends, not just the ones with whom I have recently interacted. I missed important updates from old friends because Facebook chose not to show me them.”34 Another user added: “I want to see all of my friends’ posts on my News Feed [...]. It’s simply narcissistic of Facebook

Coming Next), 23.04.2017, “SocialMediaToday,” http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-net works/how-facebooks-news-feed-algorithm-works-and-whats-coming-next [1.06.2017].

31 C. Dewey, 98 personal data points...

32 Ibidem.

33 J. Bort, How to find out everything Facebook knows about you, 10.01.2016, “Business Insider,” http://www.businessinsider.com/everything-facebook-knows-about-you-01-2015?IR=T [1.06.2017].

34 G. Schinke Fein, Is there a News Feed setting that will allow me to see all of my friends’ posts? [about 4 years ago], https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10102 175389907989 [1.06.2017].

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to think that if I don’t interact with one of my friends on FB, their posts don’t matter to me.”35 Others try to tame the algorithm by increasing the number of interactions with friends to make sure that their posts continue to appear on the boards of their friends and acquaintances. Some users are more selective in “clicking” links as they know that each move they make is of importance for the algorithm. Other ways to reduce the influence of the algorithm on the user board content include deleting or ignoring posts and news which the user does not agree with or carefully thought over clicking on links or liking articles to show activity or specific interests.

In this way, the user gives the algorithm a direction in which he would like to go. The machine will show more and more what we are interested in. Surprisingly, this is not as good as one might think.

Based on the report entitled Connected living. Dlaczego ludzie są bardziej digital niż firmy? [Connected living. Why are people more digital than companies?] prepared by the counselling company PwC, 98% of individuals, who use the digital connectivity tools every day, positively evaluate the influence of new technologies on their lives. Of this group, nearly 44% of respondents point out to a “huge role” of technology and the remainder regard it as a useful tool which helps them control their lives. The respondents believe that digital tools play an important role in the tightening of bonds with their friends (58%), family (44%) and contractors (42%).36 It looks like there are as many users who are unaware of the rule of the algorithm as those who subdue to the illusive “support in taking control of their lives” and “bond tightening.”

Meanwhile, researchers warn: “We find that social networks and search engines are associated with an increase in the mean ideological distance between individuals.”37 It results in a situation where “Individuals may choose to read only publications that are ideologically similar to one another, rarely reading opposing perspectives. We find strong evidence for the latter pattern.”38 The global village, as it seems, may also be divided not by fences but high walls.

Such algorithmic user restrictions appear already on Internet browsers as “filter bubbles.”39 They are created during the search of information on the net E. Henderson in the comment under the question: Is there a News Feed setting that will allow me to see all of my friends’ posts? [1 year ago], https://www.facebook.com/help/ community/question/?id=10102175389907989 [1.06.2017].

36 P.S., Every 4th Internaut in Poland is present on the Internet 24/7, 70% keenly publish their data, 9.02.2017, “Wirtualne Media,” http://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/polscy-inter nauci-w-sieci-przez-cala-dobe [1.06.2017].

37 S. Flaxman, S. Goel, J.M. Rao, Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption, “Public Opinion Quarterly” 80(1)/2016, p. 298.

38 Ibidem.

39 E. Pariser, The filter bubble: What the internet is hiding from you, London 2011.

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when the algorithm of a given party recognises the expectations of a particular individual and identifies his or her location, history of searches and previously selected links. The browser, therefore, provides results consistent with these data. In effect, the users still move within the same part of the network having a sense of managing the browser searches while in fact they do not have access to different types of information which exceed their interest and typical ideas of the user. With time, these ideas become strongly grounded and the individual becomes a prisoner of his/her own filter bubble. In this situation, it is difficult to put a new message across to other “prisoners” as the program blocks the information which it considers unsuitable for them.

“Echo chambers” are a much broader notion than “filter bubbles”40 as this phenomenon may also occur in many places on the Internet, especially on the social media. In echo chambers – as in an analogue room, which bounces back and amplifies the sound – users are restricted to an area where information and opinions consistent with their expectations are presented. The user tends to believe that these data prevail in the network, which reinforces his or her opinions and opinions of an entire group with a similar view of the world.

Comparable observations were made before the Internet era. The notion of “confirmation bias” has prevailed since the 1960s.41 It depicts the propensity of the human mind to pursue confirmation of its own opinions. People acknowledge the proof and confirmation of their hypotheses and neglect inconvenient facts which do not support their beliefs. This notion is more and more frequently used in the context of self-restriction of the use of the Internet. In the context of the algorithm, the confirmation bias constitutes its nature: users expect that it will consider their view of the world. The problem is that the algorithm leads to extreme opinions and excessive selectivity of friends’ entries.

The result of the foregoing phenomena is that currently the unaware user selects strictly specified information sources by neglecting the reports which he or she is not interested in and vice versa – he or she looks for information solely concerning the topics of interest for them. The rule of the algorithms is thus taken over by the actual rule of the society because “algorithms do not only make decisions in social and interpersonal spheres, but also in political and civic realms.”42 To show the echo chambers people live in on Facebook, “The Wall Street Journal” created an Internet project “Blue Feed, Red Feed.” A set of eight topics frequently discussed by people was prepared: President Trump, Health Care, R.K. Garrett, Politically motivated reinforcement seeking: Reframing the selective exposure debate, “Journal of Communication” 59(4)/2009, pp. 676-699.

41 P.C. Wason, On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task, “Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology” 12(3)/1960, pp. 129-140.

42 Z. Tufekci, Algorithmic harms beyond Facebook and Google: emergent challenges of computational agency, “Colorado Technology Law Journal” 13(203)/2015, p. 206.

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Guns, Abortion, ISIS, Budget, Executive Order, Immigration. After clicking on the button with the name of the issue, two News Feeds appear: a blue one (very liberal) and a red one (very conservative). Feeds are filled with the sources presenting such views. To appear in the blue and red feeds, posts must have at least 100 shares, and come from sources with at least 100,000 followers. In effect, we obtain a picture of two entirely different worlds.43 Network users do not differ in opinions about the reality. They live in different realities.

6. Identity avatar One of the bloggers calls: “Facebook is many things, but it’s not a news source.

Facebook’s job is to keep you clicking, and it does that by tweaking your newsfeed so you only see what you want to see, so go to Facebook to talk to friends, but go elsewhere for your news.”44 The sources of information about the world have influence on the choices made by the Internauts and shape their general as well as everyday knowledge.

By having effect on these sources, the algorithms have become an element moulding user experience and the way the Internauts construct their perception of the world.

The algorithms work loyally in the service of the application owners whose aspiration is to commoditise a cyberindividual. The results are already visible: social portals generate half of the world’s data exchange on the Internet. In this way, the omnipotence of the algorithm closes a human in the spiral of opinions and the individuals with whom he or she interacts – very often just because the acquaintance is active on the web. Thus, a new network ontology was created: a cyber-existence is not just to be, but to act. And it can be any acting.

The choice made by a machine, which is an anti-thesis of the human choice, atomises the virtual world and indirectly shapes the reality. A human is only provided with what he or she probably likes and as a result, human interests and phobias are reinforced.

I am quite sceptical about the possibility of freeing ourselves from the rule of the algorithms. A way out of this difficult situation is to abandon the use of the Internet which, in the contemporary world, does not seem possible any more.

Equally illusive would be the incorporation of the source we do not agree with J. Keegan, See Liberal Facebook and Conservative Facebook, Side by Side,” 18.05.2016 (updated hourly), “The Wall Street Journal,” http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/ [1.06.

2017].

44 A. Dornfest, This is what happens when we stop paying for quality journalism, 9.11.2016, “Medium,” https://medium.com/@ashadornfest/this-is-what-happens-when-we-stop-payingfor-quality-journalism-9be9c8d49dea [1.06.2017].

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into our own data source. It seems a little late now: since the algorithms also track the websites we visit, to mislead them we would have to access more and more new sites containing different points of view thus causing a deluge of sites of no relevance for us.

In the inclusive culture of mock socialisation flooded with an illusory immensity of information, the governing factor is the algorithm – the dealer of compulsive communication satisfying itself with likes and shares. In the simulation of one’s own activity, a human becomes merely an avatar of his or her own identity and turns from an expected beneficiary into a permissive, degraded prey.

Summary Algorithm as a Dealer of Compulsive Communication The article analyses how the algorithms managing the social media posting tools (especially those applied by the most popular social media, i.e. Facebook) influence the way the news is distributed among the users and their role as an opinion maker. It is not possible to evade the algorithms tracking the user behaviour as they register human activity in the entire network even after you have long logged out of the Facebook.

The machines track users to learn their view of the world. Having identified the views, the algorithm provides the Internauts with the posts which are consistent with their opinions. The users, who continue to absorb the posts consistent with their opinions, gradually reinforce their standpoints. In effect, network users do not differ in opinions about the reality – they live in different realities. Indirectly, the algorithms also affect human political behaviour. The ubiquitous presence of the algorithms combined with a practical need to use the social media results in a situation where restricting people to the echo chambers’ space is unavoidable.

Keywords: algorithm, social media, Facebook, polarization, extremity Słowa kluczowe: algorytm, media społecznościowe, Facebook, polaryzacja, skrajność

Re-presentations of mobile media

Piotr Aptacy University of Silesia in Katowice Institute of Culture Science and Interdisciplinary Studies

Steve Jobs – the Ascent to the Digital Pantheon

The bitten apple – one of the world’s most easily recognizable symbols. An unimaginable number of devices sold globally in recent decades. Gadgets determining the shape of the communication space in which the contemporary human is now thoroughly immersed. Finally, fronting it all, one of the most characteristic countenances symbolizing the might of the new technology industry, seen on book covers, in newspapers, internet memes and more recently on film posters and DVD covers. A splendid epitome of the “ascension of a geek.”

Steve Jobs was an exceptional figure, fusing the traits of a technologist and artist, though at the same time an ambiguous one, loved by some, sharply criticized by others. His eventful life, offering an abundance of dramatic watersheds, has tempted the authors of numerous studies. Still, they were not only interested in the biography of Apple’s founder, as much of their attention was devoted to his concepts of design and marketing tools used to launch them.

Walter Isaacson, author of one of the biographies published in Poland, describes it thus: At a time when [...] societies around the world are trying to build creative digitalage economies [he] stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.1

Looking from a certain distance at the social and media discourse concerned with Jobs, the figure of the founder of Apple may be situated in the context of W. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, transl. P. Bieliński, M. Strąkow, Kraków 2011, p. 15.

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broadly understood cultural phenomena. Following his death in 2011, the “ascension” could indeed come to pass, in which the media were instrumental.

And, it ensued not only owing to Jobs’ personal charisma and skill. His story is probably one of the best touchstones of changes that had occurred in the 1970s in the relationship between culture and technology. As Piotr Celiński observes: The artist-romantic in the domain of new media had to be replaced with a technologically adept craftsman, a programmer made famous in the mythology of digital revolution, an engineer, a technologist endowed with critical sensibility and artistic imagination. The homo faber – as a mediatic artificer – combines post-industrial and prosumerist practices in their material (hardware – vita activa) as well as symbolic (software – vita contemplativa) aspects, carves, lays bricks, assembles, decorates and networks: constructs and reconstructs the media world anew, decolonizing it from the supremacy of the mass-culture media system.2

Due to the current standing of the Apple brand in culture, the above may be applied to the initial period of Jobs’ and Wozniak’s enterprise, when the legend was being forged. Today, their achievement plays a key role in the mass sweep of consumption and culture alike. In the meantime, the ideology of “technoelites” (as construed by Manuel Castells)3 would be gradually abandoned in favour of the unyielding rules of business. In other words, the figure of Jobs, approached at a particular angle, speaks volumes about the culture which created him. The author of the 2015 article entitled Steve Jobs, Romantic Individualism, and the Desire for Good Capitalism put it thus: [...] recent narrative construction of Steve Jobs in the media as a creative entrepreneurial hero offers Jobs as someone who succeeded not by the use of rational calculation or hard work but by following his inner passion, by being “authentic” to his inner self.4

Here, we arrive at the most important aspect of Jobs’ figure; towards the end of his life, the “romantic technologist” found himself in the pantheon of celebrities, but he came to occupy a different place than icons of the entertainment industry. Eric Guthey, Timothy Clark and Brad Jackson claim that: Business celebrities are not simply well-known individuals who are attributed by journalists with actions or characteristics that lead to or exemplify business success. They are best understood as clusters of promotional activities, representa P. Celiński, Renesansowe korzenie cyfrowego zwrotu, in A. Radomski, R. Bomba (eds), Zwrot cyfrowy w humanistyce. Internet / nowe media / kultura 2.0, Lublin 2013, p. 21.

3 M. Castells, Galaktyka Internetu. Refleksje nad Internetem, biznesem i społeczeństwem, transl. T. Hornowski, Poznań 2003, pp. 49-51.

4 Th. Streeter, Steve Jobs, Romantic Individualism, and the Desire for Good Capitalism, “International Journal of Communication” 9/2015, p. 3108.

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tional practices, and cultural dynamics [...] business celebrity consists of the orchestrated co-production, cross-promotion, and circulation of images, narratives, and personal appearances of such figures via a wide range of media platforms and channels [...] If conditions are right [...] their individual actions, personal traits, physical presence, and/or private lives come to serve multiple and interconnected promotional and cultural/ideological functions in ways that reinforce their celebrity status.5

*** Steve Jobs was a hippy who appreciated technology, noting its culture-building nature (though he was not the first to do so). He was also a technologist who became a virtuoso of marketing, selling innovations in a manner alike to Weberian, “religious virtuosos” who propagated their ideas seeking to topple the existing order. These traits may encourage one to consider the place that the creator of Apple and his oeuvre – the ubiquitous “apple-marked” gadgets – occupy in the contemporary mythical sphere.

In all certainty, the primeval function of myth is the mystical one, which affords the human an insight into the mysteries of the universe and enables them to comprehend the transcendental dimension of being. Then, there is the cosmological function, through which one masters the fear of existence in a world of chaos.

Myth renders existence meaningful, providing simple explanations to even the most complex of events; on top of that, it takes away the freedom of drawing conclusions, but it offers a sense of safety, of the world being “tamed.” In the political realm, the third, sociological function of myth carries the greatest importance, as it consists in “sustaining and justifying a certain social order,” followed closely by the fourth – instructive one – which shows how to live, suggests patterns of conduct and encourages emulation.6

Myths have been an inseparable part of culture since the very beginning.

They are a component of its purely mental sphere and it is there that they come into existence. However, they are often externalized and given a material form due to the inherent human need for expression through a narrative (art or media). Both of these levels are equally important, especially today, as the process of mythologization which had once taken generations to complete, occurs nowadays at a rapid pace, owing to a fair extent to the characteristics of media resources. It needs to be noted that my approach to myth draws on an-

5 E. Guthey, T. Clark, B. Jackson, Demystifying business celebrity, New York 2009, p. 36, after: Th. Streeter, Steve Jobs, Romantic Individualism…

6 A. Siewierska-Chmaj, Mit polityczny jako fundament ideologii, in A. Siewierska-Chmaj (ed.), Przekazy polityki, Rzeszów – Kraków – Zamość 2009, p. 18.

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thropological and philosophical thought with the exception of psychoanalytical concepts, as these may lead to distinct conclusions. To quote Roland Barthes: [...] whatever its mistakes, mythology is certain to participate in the making of the world. [...] it attempts to find again under the assumed innocence of the most unsophisticated relationships, the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to make one accept. The unveiling which it carries out is therefore a political act: founded on a responsible idea of language, mythology thereby postulates the freedom of the latter. It is certain that in this sense mythology harmonizes with the world, not as it is, but as it wants to create itself [...].7

Barthes draws attention to the fact that myth is not determined by the vessel or channel of distribution through which it is disseminated. The “manner of speech” is crucial here, in other words, the rhetoric of utterances relating to the subject/object that is undergoing mythologization. Nowadays, it is created by the mass media and the views circulating in the traditional and digital social usage.8 The stories of persons and events transition first into the sphere of history, and subsequently pass into myth. The French thinker writes thus: We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature. [...] what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into something natural; it is not read as a motive, but as a reason.9

Hence, one must not fail to note the fairly obvious differences between contemporary mythologization processes and those which took place in the past. For instance, Maciej Czeremski and Jakub Sadowski present two dissimilar perspectives on myth as a cultural phenomenon. In the first, it is defined as a means of expression in traditional cultures: archaic, tribal, or rural. In the other, one underscores the universal aspect, which encompasses urban environments or information societies. Here, myth is a form of consciousness used to “lend a particular form to any substance,”10 including worldview content. Joseph Campbell, on the other hand, notes a distinct kind of dualism encountered in myths: [...] there are two totally different orders of mythology. There is the mythology that relates you to your nature and to the natural world, of which you’re a part. And there is the mythology that is strictly sociological, linking you to a particular society.

You are not simply a natural man, you are a member of a particular group.11 R. Barthes, Mit dzisiaj, in idem, Mit i znak. Eseje, transl. W. Błońska, J. Błoński, J. Lalewicz, A. Tatarkiewicz, Warszawa 1970, p. 58.

8 Ibidem, pp. 25, 26.

9 Ibidem, p. 48.

10 M. Czeremski, J. Sadowski, Mit i utopia, Kraków 2012, p. 55.

11 J. Campbell, Potęga mitu, transl. I. Kania, Kraków 2007, p. 43.

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Hence, one should consider myth as a form of worldview consciousness and recognize its role as a factor that merges society. I would also supplement it with the following observation of Barthes’: “Ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history.”12 *** The beginnings of the development of digital technologies are not infrequently associated with circumstances that tend to be perceived in mythical categories today. This is certainly the case with the emergence of the famed Silicon Valley, dating back to 1938-1939, when William Hewlett and David Packard experimented with electronic devices in a garage in Palo Alto. Much later, the unimposing facility (367 Addison Avenue) was recognized as a historical site by the authorities of California, to which the plaque stating that it is the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley” visibly attests.13 The fact that earlier (Walt Disney), and later (Steve Jobs) future corporations started out in similar circumstances contributed to something myth-like: a belief that limited financial capacity and modest premises where research is taking place are the best conditions to release the creative potential. As Pino G. Audia and Christopher I. Rider observe: However, the garage signifies more than just a commonly perceived locus of entrepreneurship. Rather it is a symbol that conjures up some common images of entrepreneurship, including the inspirational generation of innovative ideas, oldfashioned hard work and American ingenuity, bootstrapping resources to chase a dream, a rejection of the status quo, and the freedom of working for oneself.14

In any case, years later Steve Wozniak set the story of how he and Jobs toiled mainly in the garage, admitting that much of the work took place in the lab they had access to and which offered considerably better conditions for research.

As it often happens, one legend is rooted in another. The “garage myth” is but one piece from the assortment of tales that have grown around Apple’s origins. Another event – which inspires Jobs’ critics – was the notorious visit of the engineers of the future concern at Xerox’s PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) established in 1971. The facility was to be an incubator of innovation, to secure the giant of xerographic technology against the threat of dynamically developing digital devices. Allegedly, it was there that a “grand theft of ideas” took place, concepts used later by Jobs’ and Wozniak’s team to build Apple R. Barthes, Mit dzisiaj…, p. 26.

P.G. Audia, Ch.I. Rider, A Garage and an Idea: What More Does Entrepreneur Need?, “California Management Review” 48(1)/2005, p. 6.

14 Ibidem.

12 13

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Lisa and Macintosh (mainly as regards to GUI and the mouse). However, some are convinced that Xerox’s management had little idea of what to do with the inventions of PARC engineers, while Jobs stole it in a Promethean gesture from corporate gods and gave it to the users.

Irrespective of how many solutions developed at PARC were copied in Apple machines, it has to be admitted that the labs became a treasure trove of concepts and inspirations. However exaggerated it may sound, the description is warranted, as the group of scientists working for Xerox gave rise to later legends, mentioned by Anne Balsamo: In considering the research conducted at PARC, and how this work contributed to the invention of a range of technologies that became key elements of contemporary digital culture, it is difficult to separate fact from legend, politics from mythology, and innovation from marketing rhetoric. In the 1970s, PARC employed a group of computer scientists who prototyped many of the major components of the technological infrastructure of the digital age. It also was the first to employ non-computer scientists – psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, and eventually humanists – in the creative enterprise of imagining the future of computing. In this, PARC was the site of significant innovation, both in idea creation and multidisciplinary technology development. How do these facts get turned into legend?15

Giving a satisfying answer to Balsamo’s question is no easy task. Perhaps just as our ancestors felt the need to explain the shape of the world around them through belief in a higher entity, the contemporary users of computer devices prefer to situate the provenance of their gadgets in the sphere of a culturally forged absolute. A similar pattern may be observed in the assertions advanced by conspiracy theorists, who claim that most contemporary technologies originate from a spaceship that crashed in Roswell. As for the legend of the “grand theft of ideas,” it cannot be denied that concepts developed at the Palo Alto labs were treated by Apple employees as a point of departure for their own projects. For example, the PARC-designed mouse had three buttons, whereas Jobs, wishing to make the computer as user-friendly as possible, equipped the peripheral with one button. Still, the mice used today share a fair similarity with the Xerox design, so essentially their idea came out on top after all.

Those events were only the beginning of a process, years-long, in the course of which Steve Jobs and his technological opus became embedded in contemporary myth. It was influenced by factors which may be divided into three categories: – mythological and religious elements used to build the ideological image of the company and promote its products, 15 A. Balsamo, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work, Durham – London 2011, pp. 55-56.

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– almost cult-like attitude of users towards Apple devices, – the person of Jobs himself, whose mythologization began even before his death and intensified when it happened.

The latter aspect is the most important for these deliberations. Before I discuss it, however, I should briefly address the other two. It is no secret that Apple’s marketing strategy made use of religious allegories from the very outset.

The bitten apple, one of the most widely recognizable logotypes, draws on the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that nevertheless alters its original signification in favour of a symbol of the power of knowledge. One should also recall the famous commercial made in 1984 by Ridley Scott for the campaign advertising Macintosh. Admittedly, it contains references to George Orwell’s best known work, but the Promethean theme is equally important.

Similar elements can be found in slogans coined to promote particular products, such as “Touching is believing” which draws on the biblical story of the doubting Thomas, or “Think different” (1997) which on the one hand constitutes an antithetical statement to IBM’s catchphrase “Think,” and on the other, allegedly reflects Jobs’ fascination with Far Eastern philosophy. These issues are a material for a much more extensive study, but they would necessitate and exhaustive analysis of Apple’s marketing activities in the recent decades.

The religious attitude of consumers towards the ever more perfect goods produced by technology, as well as the place they occupy in the sphere of the sacred, are no new phenomena. They have been described on many occasions; it may suffice to cite Roland Barthes, who in one of his essays thus accounted for the popularity of the Citroën DS: I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object. It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object. We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter […], and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales.16

In fact, Barthes describes a certain model, a mechanism by virtue of which a technological artefact becomes sacralized. The very object of the above quote may be exchanged for any other, contemporary one, selected from the range offered by companies developing new technologies. The shiny, perfectly shaped casings of smartphones, tablets and laptops evoke very similar associations, considering the attention Apple paid to the aesthetic aspect of their products R. Barthes, Nowy Citroën, in idem, Mit i znak..., p. 78.

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(which characterized their mode of operation since the very outset), while their competition gave precedence to functional features. In 1998, David Gelernter wrote: Elegance made these computers easy to set up, use, maintain, and generally get along with. Because Apple had done its job well, the Macintosh (furthermore) attracted good software the way Marilyn Monroe attracted qualified suitors. […] But Apple’s beautiful computers were losing to Microsoft-equipped machines – and Microsoft, it was generally agreed, couldn’t care less about beauty. Microsoft cares about beauty […] the way clams about care about pantyhose. Why was beauty losing?17

Today, attention to aesthetic qualities of devices is an industry standard.

Still, Jobs’ strategy paid off, resulting in the company’s measurable gains. Very soon, users began to perceive products bearing the Apple logo not only in terms of their usefulness, which engendered phenomena verging on a religious cult, with pilgrimages to the outlets upon the release of new products.. Referring to that phenomenon, Heidi Campbell suggested the notion of “implicit religion” to describe the situation when technology becomes a substitute for religious beliefs and practices.18 As already noted, the third sphere of mythologization encompasses the story of Jobs himself and his company, the interpretations of which situate it in the allegorical context, e.g. through references to the New Testament: the modest beginnings are likened to the manger of Bethlehem, for instance. The tale of Jobs who, rejected by all, returns years later to save the company, is seen as an allegory of Jesus’ messianic mission. Finally, Apple tends to be woven into the centuries-old pattern of tales about the “struggle of good and evil,” where the latter is initially embodied by IBM, then Microsoft (and Google today).19 Deliberations of this kind can in no case be approached in scientific categories; they are rather an element of the legend that some retell in earnest while other do so with some tongue in cheek. Nonetheless, one can hardly ignore the fact that they function in cultural circulation, as they attest to one thing: Jobs and Apple were nodal points in the circulation of romantic framing of the rebel heroes of computing. Journalists, pundits, and other industry leaders and aspirants have also engaged in the discourse over the years, about Jobs and others. So, in D. Gelernter, Mechaniczne piękno. Kryterium estetyczne w informatyce, Warszawa 1999, pp. 51-52.

18 J.R. Quain, For Apple Followers, It’s a Matter of Faith, Academics Say, http://www. foxnews.com/tech/2010/07/28/new-religion-apple-say-academics.html [27.11.2016].

19 B.T. Robinson, The Marriage of Religion and Technology: Reading Apple’s Allegorical Advertising, http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/the-marriage-of-religion-and-technologyreading-apples-allegorical-advertising/ [27.11.2016].

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part, the outpouring of discourse upon Jobs’ death was because his passing created an opportunity to engage the romantic frame; whether U.S. society actually loved Steve Jobs, it loved the story.20

Drawing on Leszek Kołakowski, one should perhaps observe that the transition of iconic cultural protagonists into the mythical sphere may be seen in terms of “overcoming temporality.” The nature of events that make up a human biography begins to undergo a transformation. As Kołakowski put it: Facts are not merely facts, but building blocks of a world of values that can be saved regardless of the irreversibility of events. […] overcoming temporality is achieved in myths, which foster faith in the permanence of individual values.21

The process is not triggered exclusively by the departure of an iconic figure; the instinctive social need to recognize the values they represent as worthy of being perpetuated will suffice. A person thus becomes a legend, while the story of their lives acquires symbolic meanings, just as the deeds in the tales of heroes. Whatever historical realities may be involved, they recede slowly into the background. Maciej Czeremski and Jakub Sadowski note that: The hero myth properly emerges when the story ceases to be concerned solely with the protagonist’s impact on physical and social reality, and begins to reveal a reverse influence, in other words, a transformation of the character occurring in the course of their actions.22

However, ambivalence is a unique trait and a permanent component of Jobs’ myth. His biography is replete with episodes which would undermine any attempt at creating a flawless, perfect image. Most of those owed to the egotistic side of his personality: hogging the credit due to someone else, instrumental treatment of associates (the complex relationship with Steve Wozniak in particular) or refusal to recognize a child he fathered. Consequently, Jobs’ mythical image is more akin to the “tricksters,” characters occurring in the tales of many cultures. This is how Czeremski and Sadowski define those figures: Protagonists of that kind seem to harbour the element of primeval chaos, usually manifesting in ethically ambivalent deeds. The tricksters, who often happen to act as demiurges […], shape the world inadvertently as it were, by no means having the good or happiness of beings which inhabit it in mind. [...] they are usually selfcentred, motivated by their own interests or driven by an unfathomable fancy.23

Th. Streeter, Steve Jobs, Romantic Individualism…, p. 3115.

L. Kołakowski, Obecność mitu, Warszawa 2003, p. 16.

22 M. Czeremski, J. Sadowski, Mit i utopia…, pp. 77-78.

23 Ibidem, p. 70.

20 21

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With all of the above in mind, it seems only natural that Jobs and his achievements drew interest from the film industry, since biographies of wellknown persons are often adapted for the screen. Numerous feature films and documentaries were made, mostly after his death. The motion pictures are aptly characterized by Thomas Streeter: Like Hollywood celebrity narratives, stories about business celebrities need not be seen merely as propaganda or in terms of their most obvious ideological functions.

The stories can also serve as tools for reflection, sometimes thoughtful, on what it means to be an individual in one’s society. Like most life stories, business celebrity narratives are morality tales. It is not surprising that they are a popular young adult genre. They are often written and read with an attention to what this means for how the rest of us could or should live.24

Streeter’s remarks are even more pertinent given Jobs’ life story, which provides quite an interesting point of departure for a screenplay. The aforesaid ambivalence precludes a panegyric, which in any case would be tedious both for the author and the viewer of such a piece. A cinematic portrait has to consist of information that not infrequently proves contradictory. According to Isaacson, “people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident.”25 The difficulties that the creator of an interesting full-length plot must confront are astutely summed up by Sylwia Kołos: The concept of biographical confabulation in film does not result merely from a need to interpret or reinterpret the life of the protagonist, but often represents a natural upshot of deficient sources or creative “surfeit” of facts that call for a bit of fictional variety in film. On the other hand, this assertion may be seen as trivializing the issue since – a fact one must not overlook – irrespective of the “ennui” with the already known information or the amount of biographical riddles, there is always a person at the core of such acts.26

For the purposes of this paper, I have chosen three motion pictures in which the figure of Steve Jobs is the key element of the plot: Pirates of Silicon Valley (dir. Martyn Burke, USA 1999), Jobs (dir. Joshua Michael Stern, USA – Switzerland 2013) and Steve Jobs (dir. Danny Boyle, USA – Great Britain 2015).27 The films focus on varied periods in the life of the protagonist and place thematic Th. Streeter, Steve Jobs, Romantic Individualism…, pp. 3111-3112.

W. Isaacson, Steve Jobs…, p. 15.

26 S. Kołos, Życie sfilmowane. Uwagi o filmie biograficznym, in A. Gwóźdź, M. KempnaPieniążek (eds), Film i media – przeszłość i przyszłość. Kontynuacje, Warszawa 2014.

27 One should nevertheless mention productions which are not discussed here and do not belong in the biographical genre, such as Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy (dir. Laura Craig Gray, Tristan Quinn, Great Britain 2011); Steve Jobs: One Last Thing (dir. Sarah Hunt, Mimi O’Connor, 24 25

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emphasis on distinct issues, but share one element: selected presentations of the company’s ground-breaking products, i.e. Apple II (1977) iMac (1998) computers, as well as the iPod (2001) provide the major turning points of the plot. The first event marks the birth of the concern, the second symbolizes Jobs’ triumph, who returns having regained control over the company. Finally, the beginning of the 21st century sees the release of iPod, a momentous decision to venture beyond the personal computer market and develop multimedia devices (iPhone was launched 6 years later). Opting for the presentations as a pivotal point which symbolically divides the stages of film biographies, is a fairly obvious step. They are indeed elements of the legend, an example for others to learn from. Carmine Galo, the author of a publication devoted to Jobs’ public appearances, wrote as follows: [...] is the most captivating communicator on the world stage. No one else comes close. A Jobs presentation unleashes a rush of dopamine into the brains of his audience. Some people go to great lengths to get this hit, even spending the night in freezing temperatures to ensure the best seat at one of his speeches.28

Steve Jobs’ biopics offer valuable comparative material, too abundant to quote all the components which contribute to the mythologization of the protagonist. Still, in a pars pro toto fashion, one may accomplish much the same by looking at the presentation scenes in which the crucial elements are condensed, becoming an illustration of the gradual process of mythologization.

Firstly, though, it may be noted that Pirates of Silicon Valley is unlike the later productions because it shows the beginnings of Apple as well as Microsoft. The stories of their founders are interwoven, making up a tale which demystifies the birth of the market of personal computers. The authors highlight the lies, the subterfuge and the misdeeds of both Jobs and Gates. They are shown as doomed to antagonism, but neither demonstrates moral superiority; on the contrary, ambition, hubris, greed and envy are their principal motivations.

Pirates and the later Jobs, both delve into the 1977 show. In the former, the scene shows a crowd of terrified and exhausted geeks trying to sell their product, aware that they merely have three complete units. The California hippies begin to realize the transformation they have undergone. One of them (Wozniak) concludes: “we’re working harder than our fathers who we laughed at for how hard they worked.” Jobs disappears for a moment only to return – shaven and in a suit – and draw ironic glances from his associates. Most importantly, he is not the centre of attention in the scene, he is not even shown to speak.

Those who attend the computer fair have come there only for the technology.

USA 2011); Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, dir. Alex Gibney, USA 2015. Also, iSteve (dir.

Ryan Perez, USA 2013) is omitted as well, chiefly due to its comedic nature.

28 C. Galo, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, New York 2010, p. ix.

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In addition, Gates is there, helplessly navigating the crowds. Scorned by the future competitor, Gates leaves, but the event will later give rise to an unhealthy rivalry. The films ends with Microsoft gaining the upper hand in the market, whereas Jobs is dismissed from his own company. Thus, the presentation of Apple II is a symbolic moment which determines his success and downfall alike.

The same event, recreated in another motion picture six years later, is endowed with thoroughly different overtones. The protagonist attracts attention immediately, standing out from the crowd. His magnetism is palpable, underscored by all classic devices of the cinematic language. The moment he starts speaking, everyone’s attention is fixed on him. On the other hand, the glances of his associates are no longer ironic, but betray suppressed jealousy. This is already the mythical Jobs, a religious virtuoso in the guise of a marketing master.

The camera flashes illuminating his face only emphasize that elevation in rank.

The film by Joshua Stern relies on the existing legend and transforms it into a myth. It includes yet another scene, the 2001 release of the iPod. Jobs enters the stage and, clearly proud of himself, begins his speech. In one of the shots his face is reflected in the metallic casing of the device: the image of the creator imprinted in his work. However, editing consistently accentuates one element, namely the feelings elicited in the attending employees and guests. We see their admiring gazes, the joyous nods of agreement, the faces registering pure happiness and the enthusiastic response when the speech comes to an end.

The speaker is a prophet of new technologies, standing in front of worshippers.

His words are treated as if they were inspired by a higher being.

The release of iMac is the culminating scene in Boyle’s film, which followed two years later. The author builds up the tension slowly; his protagonist has to go through a lot before his speech can take place. The anxious audience no longer consists of discernible faces; they are an anonymous crowd which manifests its existence solely through applause. Before he takes the stage, Jobs is reconciled with his daughter on the roof of the building. Following that symbolic purification from sins, he goes down with the girl, only to leave her at the entrance to the auditorium and cross the threshold alone. A few close-ups on the faces of his loved ones with several cut-in shots on the room illuminated with strobe lights. The motion slows down, the picture becomes blurred. We do not see the presentation, but this is not necessary. Hierophany – purification – ascension.

Although it was not cinema, the elevated Jobs to the pantheon of mythical figures of contemporary culture, it did seal the fact. This is clearly the most vivid example of the growing interest of the film industry in life stories of the celebrities of digital technologies. It may suffice to mention others, such as Social Network (dir. David Fincher, USA 2010), The Fifth Estate (dir. Bill Condon, USA – India – Belgium 2013) or Snowden (dir. Oliver Stone, France – Germany – USA

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2016), productions depicting the fates of Mark Zuckerberg, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. The social media generation have their own needs for new heroes, while the fact that each of those is at least an unequivocal figure should be treated as a sign of the times.

Summary Steve Jobs – the Ascent to the Digital Pantheon In the general context, the text focuses on showing the place of digital technologies in modern culture. The figure of Steve Jobs is used as a symbol of changes occurring in the relation of users to the devices that accompany their daily life. One of the aspects of this issue is the presence of mythologization processes. The events of the 70s and 80s of the twentieth century, when the nucleus of the modern electronic industry emerged in the Silicon Valley, are gradually losing their historical dimension to the mythical one. On the other hand, the attitude of modern man to technological gadgets becomes a substitute for religious beliefs and practices. These phenomena are reflected in the media space, which in the final part of the article has been analyzed on the basis of feature films that create Steve Jobs’s screen biography.

Keywords: Steve Jobs, digital technology, mythologization, biographical movie Słowa kluczowe: Steve Jobs, technologia cyfrowa, mitologizacja, film biograficzny

Tomasz Żaglewski Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań Institute of Cultural Studies

Mobile Imagination in Graphic Storytelling: Using a Graphic Novel Format as a Tool/Area of Visual and Mobile Media Research

When it comes to consider the mobile media research area it is rather difficult to expect that comic books and graphic novels would be an important part of such a study. It already became an almost universal approach that “mobility” of a medium is a quality strictly restricted to a so called “new media” – like all the “smart” technological devices, i.e. smartphones, laptops, media players, etc. Such a portable devices indeed are accelerating our media-consumer practices accompanied by an instant broadening of a content offer and its increasing quality simultaneously following the handy-centric rhetoric of mobile media. However, as it is quite understandable that “mobility” had become some kind of a fetish for a modern technology, but restraining the “mobile” paradigm should not become a norm, especially in the context of a much needed historical perspective of media studies. For one of media studies most interesting new paths – (trans)media archeology1 – the necessity of opening scholar’s viewpoint for an older but at the same time often up-to-date phenomenon is a must and, what is most important, it actually gives us a better understanding of today’s media landscape as a part of diachronical process and not a sudden “conceptual explosion.”

I believe that mobile media research is standing before such an “archaeological turn.” And what other mobile medium could be better to do such work if not comics books – not obvious, as I said before, but completely accurate portable carrier of narrative and visual forms that have been with us since the very beginning of the 20th century. In the next sections I would like to concentrate on 1 C. Scolari, P. Bertetti, M. Freeman, Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines, Palgrave 2014.

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two main points of a comic book’s mobility – 1) a graphic narratives as a possible tools for a mobile research presentation and 2) a graphic narratives as a pre-exisitng data of a visual/mobile research. I believe that both propositions can be not only fruitful for the visual methodology and theory of mobility but as well will be very important in re-imagining comic books as a well-deserved part of visual culture (instead of treating them only like para-literature which still dominates in academic papers).

However, to begin a theoretical survey about the possible ability of a comic book research as an important part of visual/mobile media research it is crucial to make some basic theoretical remarks. If we agree that mobile media research is basically a utilization of a visual research’s content – made by the users or creators of portable devices – than we can also agree that mobile media research is becoming basically a research of a concrete mobile “vehicle” according to its content, visual specification and communication possibilities of such a device. It is not hard to connect these aspects to a movable technologies – like smartphones – but at the same time it also crucial to understand that even the “non-responsive” (in the terms of user’s navigations inside the medium’s interface) visual carriers (comic books) are suppose to be consider as a sources of images – not strictly created by the user but certainly re-construct by him/her according to a changeable contexts of a “mobile” reading act. What follows is an essential – according i.e. to Luc Pauwels2 – need for the visual studies to finally broadens theirs photo-centric approach and include some non-photograhic images like graphic commercials, cartoons or narratives in that matter that are also connected with a cultural practices of theirs users in the private/public spaces of media presence. Finally, through the previous statements it becomes clear that amongst the much-restricted non-photographical data of visual studies comics and graphic novels are especially abandoned from the academic’s perspective for theirs possible “juvenile” aspect. As I strongly believe, it could become some form of a revelation for many scholars to get through the “naïve” schemes of graphic fiction and discover, as I will try to do, many interesting layers of visual codes and tropes of mobility as a cultural dynamic.

To do so is to follow one of the possible tracks of comic book research as a visual/mobile media research. Therefore it can be said that we can consider an individual graphic narrative as – an object of research – according to which comic books and graphic novels contains a various selection of visual and narrative tropes (i.e. about a mobile media aspects or/and mobility in culture), L. Pauwels, An Integrated Conceptual Framework for Visual Social Research, in E. Margolis, L. Pauwels (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods, Los Angeles – London – New Delhi 2011.

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– a subject of research – where comic books and graphic novels can be used, similarly to photography, film or computer graphics, as an attractive tool for visualising researcher’s effects (concentrating around the recreation of visual/mobile study).

As a result an academic gains another visual tool for distribution his/hers thesis. Such a tool can be restricted, of course, to a practical abilities of researcher (not everyone will be able to find a satisfactory sort of images, not to mention the simple competence in drawing) but it surely finds a new area for visual studies with theirs paradigm of visual incoding of a knowledge. What is also important for the “comic books as a subject of research” approach is to answer the “interdisciplinary call” (such crucial for today’s humanities). Comic book and graphic novels as a bimodal texts (hybrids of word and image) can truly appear as an ‘expanded’ field for both visual studies and more “orthodox” language-orientated studies as they are truly empowering the dialogical mechanism of an image-word cooperation which can create a fascinating forms of duo-modal presentations. It is also important here that by “subjectification” of comic books as a notion for visual studies approach we can significantly reconsider our understanding of visual culture – once again not only restricted to a technological carriers but a much bigger amount of human-created images.

Basically, when we think about graphic narratives as a possible example of a language that can be used by the researcher during the visual presentation of his/hers thesis there are especially two main examples of such an approach. First of them comes from the groundbreaking publication by Scott McCloud called Understanding comics which was prepared in 1993 as a comic’s para-theory made by using the comic’s visual style.3 McCloud’s effort should be therefore treated not as a strictly analytical research of comics, but rather as a comic book that is an analytical research at the same time. By paraphrasing the famous sentence from Marshall McLuhan, we can say that truly a “comic book is the message” here as long as a consciously chosen form of lecture made by an author is becoming an important factor in broadening and/or sharing the linguistic content. The basic visual form of the book can be treated here as the very first idea that suppose to be discussed throughout the publication. Therefore we can assume that theoretical presentation is becoming a very personal story here4 – as McCloud is accompanying the reader as a graphic model of himself – and vice versa by “narrating” the theory of comics thanks to the everlasting presence of a drawn lecturer. Although Understanding comics – and its followers Making comics and Reinventing comics – are not well recognized by S. McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York 1994.

Probably best described by the last panel of the book/comic book where we see McCloud’s wife and his young child on her hands while woman is saying: “At least you’re not married to him. I get this all the time!” Ibidem, p. 215.

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the academic researchers, that are mostly accurately accusing McCloud for too shallow and theoretically restricted approach, a main goal of his book can become an interesting starting point for re-considering graphic narratives as a part of visual studies. It is a classic example of a “comics as subjects of research” idea where graphic form can be used equally to a photography or any other mechanical form of image’s reproduction where a visual content is becoming a research vessel and methodological tool at the same time.

If McCloud’s Understanding comics was not completely appreciated for its rather weak academic background, that Unflattening written and drawn by Nick Sousanis became a true phenomenon of last few years. Prepared as a doctoral dissertation Unflattening basically goes beyond the aspirations of McCloud – which referred mostly to a visual re-imagination of a comic book theory – to a much more universal goals where a theory and form of comics can be regarded as a critique tool for modern culture. There is definitely a double perspective here – Sousanis is creating a theory of comics and/as a visual/social study. By using graphic storytelling author is presenting a specific visible forms as a starting points for the discussions about wider concepts like the one-dimensional man from Herbert Marcuse, the Flatland idea from Edwin Abbott or the rhizome model by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The connection between these theories and Sousanis’s graphic form appears when it comes to pointing at comic book’s bimodal language specific as a medium that can actually help to break the “one-dimensional” culture restrictions and learn how to embrace the divergence of thoughts and visions. Exactly the same effort is made by the author here when he is trying once again not only to illustrate the concrete aspects of social/cultural theory but rather to find for them a “dialogical” graphical co-partners. The main motto here – both for the subjective research use of graphic narration and the conceptual project of Sousanis – is that “Comics beyond uniting text and words, allow for the integration and incorporation of multiple modes and signs and symbols”5 and at the same time they are showing the neccessity of a “dialogue” perspective – an ability to combine “separate paths” of thoughts and vision as a project for the cultural participation.

One can say that Unflattening is presenting the best qualities of an “objectified” and “subjectified” application of comic books for visual studies. Graphic narration form is fully shown here as an exemplification of searching for an “unflattened” or “spatial” medium – both in terms of activating the reader/ viewer and creating an environment of a multimodal dialogue (both inside this particular book and in its external social environment). Therefore, both Understanding comics and Unflattening are becoming an examples of using a graphic

N. Sousanis, Unflattening, Cambridge 2015, p. 65.

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content both as object and subject of research. It is crucial to look at the W.J.T. Mitchell’s postulate of “pictorial turn” here: Whatever the pictorial turn is, then, it should be clear that it is not a return to naive mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictorial “presence”: it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality. It is the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual experience or “visual literacy” might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality.6

I strongly believe that “comic book turn” inside the “pictoral turn” embodied Mitchell’s “tensions” between the images and theirs socio-cultural context.

Both McCloud’s and Sousanis’s propositions are a visual materials that exists in a specific limitations of its form, medium, potentialities of distribution and discursive models. Secondly, they are also mainly dependent on the reading practices of the viewers – especially by its specific bimodal structure and bimodal type of lecture.

Considering a graphic narratives as an objects of research in the context of the mobile media theory is still a not very common effort, but nevertheless it can bring some interesting ideas about comic books as a pre-existed data of social imagination about the technological mobility. One of the most promising examples of such a texts is the classic crime-noir comic book firstly published by its creator – Chester Gould – in 1931. Dick Tracy series quickly became not only a very important point in the process of comic’s evolution but as well can be seen as the very first attempt to introduce a specific idea about media mobility inside the “classic” criminal stories. According to Judith A. Nicholson, an author of Calling Dick Tracy! or, Cellphone Use, Progress, and a Racial Paradigm we can say that: The promise of a mobile device for personal communication has captured the imagination of Americans for years. Comic book character Dick Tracy used a tiny wristwatch phone to communicate while Don Adams on TV’s Get Smart popularized the “shoe phone.” More closely resembling today’s flip-open cellular phones were hand-held communicators used on the TV series Star Trek.7

Gould’s police detective seems to fit quite well, as Nicholson explains, into a long way of connections between the popular cultural narratives and devel W.J.T. Mitchell, The Picture Theory, Chicago 1994, p. 16.

J.A. Nicholson, Calling Dick Tracy! or, Cellphone Use, Progress, and a Racial Paradigm, “Canadian Journal of Communication” 33(3)/2008, pp. 380-381.

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oping a particular social images, but also a practical technological devices as well. It is eventually a common truth that mentioned before Star Trek’s mobile communicators were a direct inspiration for the Motorola company to develop their own “mobile talkie” called Motorola DynaTAC in 1984. At the same time long before the actual availability of such a inventions popular texts were already building a specific type of consumer’s expectations and knowledge about mobile devices – as in the “Get Smart” TV series or in the Gould’s comic strips.

It is also worth to mention that even nowadays Dick Tracy is still existing in the common discourse about technical mobility when he is directly mentioned in the articles like Samsung’s new Gear S smartwatch: just don’t mention Dick Tracy,8 From Dick Tracy to Apple Watch: 70 years of smartwatches,9 How Dick Tracy invented smartwatch10 or 13 smartwatches even Dick Tracy would be jealous of.11 It has to be noticed here that truly Tracy is the very first fictional user of the mobile device – the famous wrist’s Police video-communicator (phone-watch) – which puts him in the avant-garde of visual representations of such a devices.

Louis Galambos & Eric John Abrahamson note – as Nicholson continues – that Gould created the phone-watch one decade after the introduction of two-way radio dispatch in police cars, shortly after testing and use of the portable Handie-Talkie wireless radio by American soldiers in World War II, one year before engineers at Bell Labs announced that they had pioneered the idea for cellular communication, and three decades before a working cellphone was invented in the U.S. in 1973 by Canadian researcher Martin Cooper and his team of engineers at Motorola.12

What follows is that Galambos and Abrahamson are even ready to enlist Chester Gould into the spectrum of the most important innovators in the history of mobile technology – just side by side with Guglielmo Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell, Lars Magnus Ericsson, Samuel Morse, Lee De Forest, and Paul Galvin, who are credited with pioneering telegraphy, telephony, and radio. Dick Tracy’s legacy of conceptual inventing a phone-watch and its first visual representation demands also to look – according to a visual studies paradigm – just how exactly these graphic images are defining the mobility. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/28/samsungs-curved-gear-ssmartwatch-dick-tracy [11.05.2017].

9 http://www.cultofmac.com/297399/dick-tracy-apple-watch-70-years-smart-watches/ [11.05.2017].

10 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-dick-tracy-invented-smartwatch180954506/ [11.05.2017].

11 http://www.gadgetreview.com/1-smartwatches-even-dick-tracy-would-be-jealous-of [11.05.2017].

12 J.A. Nicholson, Calling Dick Tracy!..., p. 382.

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Fig. 1. Dick Tracy’s heritage is still usable for today’s discourse about mobile media Source: http://www.gadgetreview.com/1-smartwatches-even-dick-tracy-would-be-jealous-of.

The very first idea that comes to mind when we looks at the fundamental distinction between the Police enforcers and theirs adversaries in Dick Tracy comics is that there exists a very clear idea about law and order and that the model of justice is built on “a racial paradigm of White law enforcers struggling to immobilize Dark and immigrant law-breakers in American cities.”13 The source for that representation can be found in the tradition of an American ‘World Fairs” that could possibly have a massive impact on Gould’s perspective of technology’s role in society. As Richard Dyer writes that “progress” – that was coming almost as a promise of every “World Fair” at the beginning of the previous century – were often naturalized as a logical path that was followed by White Westerners. At World Fairs, technological innovations from the West were exhibited alongside the “primitive” tools and people of Polynesia, Africa, and elsewhere for predominantly White audiences.14 According to this idea than the whole history of technological evolution can be seen as a never-ending process of inclusion and exclusion according to the availability and function of a particular medium. For Judith A. Nicholson we can possibly look in that matter on [...] a radio and the wired telephone, the putative progenitors of the cellphone, [that] were used in the U.S. to organize mobs during the era of “spectacle lynchings” […]. Light and telephone poles that were erected in the nineteenth century for communication were used as hanging posts for some victims of lynching in the following decades […]. The first portable Kodak camera, released in 1888, was used to make both family photos and souvenir photos of lynching.15 Ibidem, p. 383.

Ibidem, p. 385.

15 Ibidem.

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Fig. 2. Dick Tracy using a smartwatch’s ancestor Source: https://englishatwaterloo.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/dick-tracys-wrist-radio-part-2/

Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy follows exactly the same pattern of the early-20th century imagination about the (mobile) technology as a tool of white power and justice against the “technology-lacked” non-White criminals. The most important visual and ideological representation of that power is the phone-watch itself – a very clear symbol of “mobility” that can be seen as both a self-controlled apparatus and a very effective weapon that organizes police enforcers when its needed. As Judith A. Nicholson sums up, an access to all the possible and non-possible technological objects in Dick Tracy clearly represents the Police’s [...] power to organize the material world [where] In the world of the comic strip, the phone-watch, which only Dick used, further distinguished the White law enforcer from the Dark law-breakers he sought to immobilize.16 Ibidem, p. 390.

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Mobility and immobilization – seen here as a social and racial concept – are appearing here as a very interesting case of mobility visualization and conceptual representation that also can unravel some interesting historical clues about the mobile imagination that reaches as far as the 1930’s and becomes at the same time an interesting study for the visual culture researchers.

Fig. 3. An iconic presentation of comic’s first mobile technology Source: http://dicktracy.wikia.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_Radio.

Of course, Dick Tracy is not the only example of a graphic story that includes a mobile technologies. Alongside the more modern features there can be found another interesting cases like the Warren Eliss’s Global Frequency series or The Batgirl of Burnside storyline from Brenden Fletcher, Cameron Stewart, Babs Tarr. Both titles can be seen as a continuation of some of the Gould’s radical cultural distinctions that are made by the mobile devices included into the stories. For example, Global Frequency presents a dystopian future where an access to “mobility” – still represented by a fancy cell-phones – continues to be the most representative image of a law enforcer. What comes new here is that “mobility” refers also to the central position of web-mediated communication which repeats Dick Tracy’s social and racial notion that if you’re not in the group of “the mobile web users” than you’re not to be seen/respect at all. The Batgirl of Burnside stands for an another modern idea about mobile technology in comic books, but this time it is represented on two levels. The first one in an interesting visual convention taken by the authors that tries to recreate the interface of portable devices/services on the page. The second aspect here refers to a confrontation between the “stereotypical” superhero narration and the notion about the supersaturation of media (with the all-infiltrated by media storyworld) that creates a whole new agenda for the title superheroine and hers abilities to fight for justice.

Fig. 4. Mobile phone as a crime-fighting tool Source: Global Frequency. Vol 01, scen. W. Ellis, rys. G. Leach, WildStorm Productions 2002, s. 2.

Fig. 5. A “mobile media aesthetic” inside a comic book story Source: Batgirl. Vol 01: The Batgirl of Burnside, scen. B. Fletcher, C. Stewart, des. B. Tarr, DC Comics 2015, s. 69.

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As I tried to present in my short presentation, comic books and graphic novels could and should be seen as a fruitful areas of research when it comes to both visual or mobile media studies. Theirs application to both of the fields requires of course some conceptual re-framing but at the same time it gives us a possibility to unravel some new territories of visual cues and data. The one thing required here seems to be the “mobilization” of the academic’s perspective against the “immobilized” prejudice against comic book’s aesthetic.

Summary Mobile Imagination in Graphic Storytelling: Using a Graphic Novel Format as a Tool/Area of Visual and Mobile Media Research The main goal of the article is to present a graphic storytelling as an interesting area of a visual and mobile media studies. By referring to the classical and modern research about the comic book’s aesthetic author is trying to prove that the art of a motion-less visuals can be beneficial to both the study of an image-centric and a mobilized culture.

Through a specific examples of a graphic stories – like Dick Tracy or Global Frequency – this analysis tries to explain that only by accepting a comic book as an operational visual and mobile medium it is possible to present a complete proposal of a fully developed visual and mobile methodology.

Keywords: graphic storytelling, comic books, mobile media, visual studies, Dick Tracy Słowa kluczowe: opowieści graficzne, komiks, media mobilne, badania wizualne, Dick Tracy