Author Archives: timokaerlein

21st and 22nd of April, 2016
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies
The University of Warwick

Website: http://warwick.ac.uk/streamsofconsciousness

Call for Presentations:

“What’s on your mind?” This is the question to which every Facebook status update now responds. Millions of users sharing their thoughts in one giant performance of what Clay Shirky once called “cognitive surplus”. Contemporary media platforms aren’t simply a stage for this cognitive performance. They are more like directors, staging scenes, tweaking scripts, working to get the best or fully “optimized” performance. As Katherine Hayles has pointed out, media theory has long taken for granted that we think “through, with and alongside media”. Pen and paper, the abacus, and modern calculators are obvious cases in point, but the list quickly expands and with it longstanding conceptions of the Cartesian mind dissolve away. Within the cognitive sciences, cognition is now routinely described as embodied, extended, and distributed. They too recognize that cognition takes place beyond the brain, in between people, between people and things, and combinations thereof. The varieties of specifically human thought, from decision-making to reasoning and interpretation, are now considered one part of a broader cognitive spectrum shared with other animals, systems, and intelligent devices.

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CFP: Haptic Media Studies
Call for papers for a themed issue of NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY
Guest editors: David Parisi, Mark Paterson, and Jason Archer

Abstracts due (400-500 words): November 1, 2015 November 8, 2015 (deadline extended)

https://www.academia.edu/16055300/CFP_Haptic_Media_Studies

Interacting with, navigating, and manipulating media has always depended on touch–whether turning pages, folding paper, depressing buttons, typing on keys, or twisting knobs, there is always an act of touching at the heart of mediated communication. The recent rise of touchscreen and gestural interfaces, mobile computing, video gaming, wearable communication devices, and emerging virtual reality platforms disrupts the previous material stability of these media interfaces, prompting the adoption of new, embodied navigational habits. At the material level, we now touch media in novel ways, becoming accustomed to their shape, size, texture, temperature, and weight, while also learning to be receptive to the signals media objects transmit to us through a hitherto seemingly dormant tactile channel.

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