Abstract
Lev Manovich explains that interaction is an obvious function of the computer that should not be confused with precomputer audience interaction in the form of reading audiovisual information and interpreting meaning.1 Digital media, then, functions within closed systems, not outside them. This chapter examines two types of interaction that are potentially not overdetermined by corporate and state surveillance of data gathering. Here, interaction functions as critical or tactial engagement. We analyze digital media that forwards the ideals of tactical media that Rita Raley has described that engage in strategic micropolitics rather than grand revolutions.2 We examine digital media projects that include counter-gaming, machinima (3D animation shot in a game engine), video performances, and documentaries that appeal to affective and subjective forms of knowledge and reject assumptions that objectivity and evidence are the only valid forms. Identities are not fixed but performed, that is, contingent upon politics rather than place. We also probe narrowcasting, which reconfigures the push of broadcasting on commercial networks in the direction of P2P models, somewhat like the “spreadability” described by Henry Jenkins.3 Given restrictions on both print and online access to journal articles, Katherine Hayles argues that academic work largely has “a negligible audience and a nugatory communicative function.”4
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Notes
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2001): 55–56.
Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012): 3.
Ulises Ali Mejias, Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013): 3.
Ibid., 128. He cites Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Rotterdam: NAi, 2009): 72–73.
Louisa Stein, “Online Roundtable on Spreadable Media by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green with participants Paul Booth, Kristina Busse, Melissa Click, Sam Ford, Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, and Sharon Ross,” Cinema Journal 53.3 (Spring 2014): 153.
See Moradewun Adejunmobi, “Evolving Nollywood Templates for Minor Transnational Film,” Black Camera 5.2 (Spring 2014): 74–94.
Patrick Jagoda, “Gamification and Other Forms of Play,” boundary 2 40.2 (2013): 114.
Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006): 107.
See Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, New Media Art (Köln: Taschen, 2007): 44–45.
Helga Tawil-Souri, “The Political Battlefield of Pro-Arab Video Games on Palestinian Screens,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 27.3 (2007): 535.
David Machin and Usama Suleiman, “Arab and American Computer War Games: The Influence of a Global Technology on Discourse,” Critical Discourse Studies 3.1 (April 2006): 2.
Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, updated edition (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2009).
Gabriele Ferri. “Satire, Propaganda, Play, Storytelling. Notes on Critical Interactive Digital Narratives,” Interactive Storytelling 8230 (2013): 175.
Gabriele Ferri, “Rhetorics, Simulations and Games: The Ludic and Satirical Discourse of Molleindustria,” International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations 5.1 (2013): 32–49.
See Lina Khatib, “The Visual Rush of the Arab Spring,” Images Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012): 117–167.
Tarik Ahmed Elswwei, “A Revolution of the Imagination,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1197, 1198.
Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Tarik Ahmed Elswwei, “A Revolution of the Imagination,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1200.
Eric Jensen, “Mediating Social Change in Authoritarian and Democratic States: Irony, Hybridity, and Corporate Censorship,” in Culture and Social Change: Transforming Society Through the Power of Ideas, ed. Brady Wagoner, Eric Jensen, Julian A. Oldmeadow (Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2012): 219.
For an analysis of drifting and other youth-culture practices, see Pascal Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Mehdi Semati, “The Geopolitics of Parazit, the Iranian Televisual Sphere, and the Global Infrastructure of Political Humor,” Popular Communication 10.1–2 (January 2012): 120, 121.
Geoffrey Baym, “The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism,” Political Communication 22 (2005): 273.
See Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (London and New York: Verso, 2009): 88–120.
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom: Crossing Press, 1984): 110–114.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).
Fulvio Irace, “Dubai: Second Life City,” Abitare 473 (June 2007): 93–103.
Yasser Elsheshtawy, Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle (London and New York: Routledge, 2010): 249. GCC states represent 12 percent of the Arab population but 55 percent of its economy (29).
Sarah Kanouse, “Transmissions between Memory and Amnesia: The Radio Memorial in a New Media Age,” Leonardo 44.3 (2011): 202.
Supply-chain studies includes books tracking commodities such as Robert J. Foster, Coca-globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Orla Ryan, Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa (London: Zed Books, 2012).
For a more nuanced analysis of Chinese migrant women in textiles, see Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2009).
Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London and New York: Routledge, 2010): 112.
Brian Larkin, “Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy,” Public Culture 16.2 (spring 2004): 309.
Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995): 85–92.
Mejias, Off the Network, 90–91; Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses, (New York: Peter Lang, 2007): 5.
See Dale Hudson, “Horrors of Anthropocentrism: ‘Improved Animals’ on the Islands of Dr. Moreau,” in Transnational Horror across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies, ed. Dana Och and Kirsten Strayer (London and New York: Routledge, 2013): 209–227.
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© 2015 Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann
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Hudson, D., Zimmermann, P.R. (2015). Tactical Engagement through Gaming and Narrowcasting. In: Thinking Through Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137433633_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137433633_5
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