Digital multimedia and its territorial locations -- cyberspace -- has been portrayed as liberatory, enslaving, or revolutionary. This paper explores the nature of narratives of multicultural societies in multimedia, through the specific example of an Australian project - Making Multicultural Australia. The paper argues that multimedia has the potential to offer multi-focal cross-cultural spaces for exploration of competing narratives of the social. Based on over six years of intensive research, and on materials collected over thirty years, the CDROM project, Making Multicultural Australia tells the many stories of struggle, setback and triumph that have formed contemporary Australia. Originally conceived as a book which would capture a "people's history" of Australian cultural diversity, it became one and then three CDROMs, an incalculably rich source of ideas, experiences, information and controversy. 

This presentation is focused on the historical connections between online community and commerce/economics. It makes the case that the most influential symbol for online community, the WELL, should be examined in light of sociocultural trends "apart" from Internet-related ones, most importantly those that began to shape the social mores of the Baby Boom generation in the late 1960s. Of particular importance is the borrowing of language and ideas from Sixties literature and song in subsequent structuring of community discourse. That structuring must be further connected to post-60s capitalism to add a missing and important historical link to contemporary debates about the construction of online community. Particular emphasis will be placed on the rhetoric of community as it has been taken up by those in e-commerce endeavors.

This paper examines patterns of comparative media use amongst south Asians in the American south.  It looks at the complex intersection between popular culture (the Hindi film industry), Internet use and traditional folk culture (songs, dances and religious performances).

By using Cyberperformance as a creative combination of cyberspace, metaspace, and deepspace, the organic professor on the inorganic net seeks to develop a theatrical ritual with students as performers that fulfills a pedagogical objective, ritualizes conflicts in the academic community, and heals the breaches with catharsis and redressive action. The paper will document Cyberperformance I: Humans and Nature, Cyberperformance II: Self versus State, Cyberperformance III: Educational versus Commercial Web Development, Cyberperformance IV: Heat Wave 99: Characters Sizzling in Time, and Cyberperformance V: The Century: Laugh!! From 2000 Years of Jokes and Mistakes. Cyberperformance will be discussed as a genre-in-transition which helps create performative strategies and arenas for online and cyber-enhanced learning.

Employing recent developments in cognitive theory, this paper examines how sports spectators engage in an intertextual process of game play which simultaneously recalls their experience of spectatorship across the board (in television, video games, and spectator sports) as well as tapping into their experience -- real or imagined -- in participant sports. Video games thereby become positioned within a historical line of sports spectatorship and its attendant notions of interactivity and empowerment.

I will discuss the innovative (and controversial) layouts of graphic designer David Carson in the context of broader issues in media studies. In particular, I will suggest that Carson's kinetic style is driven by an aesthetic that takes "information" and "media" as objects of representation in and of themselves, and that print, far from being outmoded and irrelevant in the midst of the current "Information Age," is in fact a vital component of our media ecology -- precisely because designers like Carson use print to consolidate and disseminate their aesthetics of information so effectively.

Domestic web-cams provide a new twist in the social practices oriented around the distinctions between private and public space. On the one hand they are located in the most public of mediums -- the Internet, which by design is available to anyone with the right technology. Yet on the other, domestic web-cams allow the pretense of entering into the most private spaces of home life. This presentation examines the nature of this mediation between the private and the public made possible by web-cam technology. 

The attention received by the promise and performance of the hypertext-based World Wide Web has obscured the increasing hypertextual nature of television. However, it is important  to see hypertext for what it truly is -- a step in the evolution of media.  In this paper, we explore the convergence of hypertext and television, and investigate their relationship to the concept of hypertextuality in order to illuminate the interplay of influence in the latest metamorphosis in media. Our approach uses hypertextuality as a prism, or new instrument of insight, to reveal unnoticed, naturalized and mystified aspects of the medium of television. We focus our analysis on the application of these concepts to television, explore what hypertext and hypertextuality imply for our present media culture, and extrapolate to what these notions mean for the future. 

In this presentation, I want to theorize how users experience the internet as a site of performance. Participants enter a site as performers and the interface determines what kind of role they perform. Exploring this theory through The Blair Witch Project's homepage, it can be seen how the designers of this site use scientific tropes in an attempt to make the fantastic seem real. Using various performance theories, I hope to explain how the interface helps shape the participant's experience/performance, which causes fantasy to blur into reality. In addition, I want to explore how this web site extends the story of the film itself.

John Maeda has examined the issue of teaching Computer Science to traditional design students for the past decade and will present the history of this work which culminates his recent Design By Numbers project. In addition, since arriving at MIT in 1996, Maeda has been looking at the issue of designing studio art courses in Computer Science for MIT graduate and undergraduate students. he will present work from these courses which span issues in form, typography, and photography.

This paper looks at the ways in which television is constructed as a cultural object. It suggests that despite the relative antiquity of the medium, its status and uses are still a matter of contestation. In this, a focus on the constitution of and contestation over new communication technologies draws attention away from the fact that older communications technologies are by no means stable in their cultural positioning and meanings. I would argue then that while vernacular theory takes television as a cultural resource of programs which might archived and understood as 'heritage', academic criticism has largely taken the programs to be unimportant. In this, I see continuing contestation over what this 'old communications technology' is, and the uses to which is should be put.

In setting his 1898 tale "In the Cage" at a telegraph counter, Henry James was appropriating a technology that earlier novelists such as Dickens had used as an analogue for the workings of fictional realism: electric telegraphy. But James's new attention to telegraphy as a material practice and a medium indicates the way in which the imaginative possibilities of even literary "media" such as realistic fiction may change as newer technologies emerge.

This short review of predictions of the end of books spans the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, with an eye to contemporary predictions that books-as-we-know-them may soon disappear. The nature of the sources, orientations, and underlying assumptions of these predictions is explored. The analysis reflects on the need to consider books as part of the media system, taking into account not only social, economic, and cultural issues but also the practitioners' perspectives.

This paper will explore ways in which technological transformations in contemporary entertainment media such as film and theme park attractions reflect a neo-baroque form. Entertainment forms reveal an open, dynamic structure that strategically makes ambiguous the boundaries that distinguish reality from illusion. 

In 1999 the NSW Breast Cancer Institute (on behalf of BreastScreen NSW) and academics, students and video production staff from UWS Nepean jointly began a research project to document the life stories of fourteen women from non-English speaking backgrounds, and to analyze their ideas about breast health and its maintenance.

This exploration in interculturalism involved
a) Interviewing the women who agreed to take part in the project
b) Making a short documentary film
c) Rewriting the research interviews as stories for a companion booklet
d) Translating each story into the birth language of the teller
e) Involvement of video production students in the making of the documentary
f) preparation of a research report.

Many of the stories include accounts of mothers, friends or relatives who have suffered or died from breast cancer. They provide important documentation of the impact of breast cancer on the families and friends of its victims.

But the stories go further. They show how women from non-English speaking backgrounds approach breast health activities using their migration experience of starting over in a different place and language community. The stories demonstrate the women's capacity to develop and maintain, when assisted by government policy, community safety nets for the education and well being of community members.

The lesson taught by these stories is that breast health cannot be separated from personal health. Continuing to enjoy good health requires the support and encouragement of friends and family and an investment by women themselves in the skills and knowledge needed to stay in touch with new developments.

As an active health strategy, staying healthy might involve activities as varied as developing friendship networks, participating in community education programs, and even learning English late in life. But most importantly for women these days it involves a positive commitment to preventative measures like breast screening so that women can live to enjoy their families and friends.

The project focuses attention on the ways government policy needs to engage more closely with the health perspectives of women, both individually and as communities. It demonstrates the possibility of research which delivers to the host community research outcomes that they can both understand and value (like a video and booklet of stories). But it has shortcomings too which need to be discussed.

From its earliest days, science fiction has had a catalytic effect on the development of a range of technologies. Radio, television and nuclear weapons first presented themselves to the popular mind in works such as H.G. Wells' novels and Hugo Gernsback's manifold publications. Beginning with the publication of Vernor Vinge's novella True Names (1980), science fiction thrust itself to prominence as a creative whiteboard for the architecture of systems of software. This points to the novel as "tinker toys" in the new universe of virtuality; the blank page echoes the black silence of cyberspace devoid of human presence, and the creative act of putting words on the page becomes in the 21st century the spell of words which create worlds. A thousand-year-old medium has, in the age of computing machinery, become the ultimate programming tool and the clearest compass into the forms of the future.

The explosion of electronic journalism (Editor and Publisher reports an 83 percent increase in newspaper web sites in the last two years) and the increasing range of options for instantaneous news coverage are easily documented. Beyond tallying these increased news outlets, however, media analysts also can begin examining the impact of this method of news delivery and the evolving function of online editors. Although traditional daily newspaper criteria -- such as issue or event prominence, local relevance, and reader interest -- still guide many editors in filling the screens of their online editions, audience-centered formulae are also driving the journalistic decision-making process on content inclusion, placement, and tone. Based on page impression data, textual analysis of daily newspaper web pages, and interviews with online editors and new media managers, this paper will address the major factors in the online newspaper's gatekeeping function.

In this post-modern, post-Einsteinian period, time becomes space, as most major dailies are able to expand exponentially from three, static print editions to 24-hour web pages with updates every few minutes. Given the myriad wire service, syndicated, and in-house sources for news copy, the online editor sifts daily through a melange of possible stories. The electronic news budgeting process becomes a constant hacking through copy, photo files, and wire service updates to decide which stories will be displayed, which deserve headline links, and which will be discarded for lack of space, importance, or reader interest. Once editors select articles, they still wrestle with issues of placement and display as they fashion a 'look' and 'feel' for their web sites that often differ significantly (usually less conservative) from the tone of their printed-page counterparts. Running throughout this sequence is a more emphatic version of the age-old, editorial gatekeeping quandaries: What should we show our readers versus what do our readers want to see? And, add to that the bottom-line corollary of today's competitive electronic marketplace: How many page views will it get? 

The Last Vaudevillian is a road movie about a traveling entertainer and a documentary about an important tradition of non-fiction film. It explores the little-known world of itinerant lecturers who tour around North America showing travelogue movies. The documentary follows one lecturer on tour from New York to Florida in the spring of 1998 as he presents his feature travelogue Cuba at the Crossroads. 

Even only ten years ago electronic mail was a novelty outside of computer science departments. But now, with tens of millions of people on-line, email is constituent of much day-to-day social and professional life. This rapid increase in the number of Internet inhabitants has made possible the unprecedented phenomenon of very large-scale conversations (VLSCs) in which hundreds, even thousands, of people participate in many-to-many communications. The most obvious manifestations of this phenomenon are Usenet newsgroups hosted on hundreds of thousands of servers on the Internet and archived by a handful of industrially-sized sites (e.g., http://www.dejanews.com). These conversations are not amenable to current discourse analysis techniques, and we hardly know where to begin in analyzing discussions consisting of 100,000 or more messages a year. In this paper we introduce a set of computational tools that can graphically display and assist in the analysis of VLSCs. We are especially interested in a set of VLSCs devoted to illness-based social movements. Illness-based social movements are one example of a new sort of politics that is facilitated by the advent of VLSCs. Using the graphical display capabilities of our computational tools, we present several findings concerning illness-based social movements. We elaborate and supplement the computationally facilitated findings with another set of close- and contentualizing-readings of the communications of the illness-based social movements. The Investigation of VLSCs and Illness-Based Social Movements is collaborative work underway at the MIT Science, Technology, and Society Program and the MIT Media Laboratory. 

Far from an impediment, early debates about television's positive and negative effects on children, families, and society sometimes aided the programming and marketing choices of some producers. This paper reads early Disney television -- specifically, Disneyland and The Mickey Mouse Club -- as a case study in the use of media-effects arguments as marketing guides, and of the popular (re)production of ideas of childhood and family life as nucleation sites for the future of American culture and society.

This paper looks at the changing parameters of documentaries in the digital age, specifically what constitutes the 'text' and who controls the vision of the film. I analyze the Frontline documentary, Secret Daughter, written by June Cross.  Examining its reliance on both tv and the webpage, I consider how multiple technologies  affect the message of the documentary. The source material includes interviews with the filmmaker, executive producer David Fanning, and the web designers at WGBH.

The argument of this paper is that both academic and political/economic discourses on the information society are tied to the instrumental projects of developing a technological infrastructure and instituting economic practices for controlling the exchange of informational products. As such, they operate with a conception of information that brackets its meaning, while allowing "information as meaning" to remain as an unspoken background that seeps into its discourse. An analysis of information science and economics will show that "information" is defined as nonsemantic discrete bits flowing across space and then directed and stored. This substantiates information as the object of control.

Since Vannevar Bush wrote "As We May Think" in 1945, we've been chasing the dream of a vast library of digital publications. Advances in hardware plus the development of the internet may finally make it possible to turn the dream into reality. The one ingredient still missing, however, is software that will enable non-technical authors to assemble elegant and complex electronic documents. Since leaving Voyager three years ago, Stein has been working to develop such tools. He will demonstrate the beta version, due to be released later in October. 

A regional media firm in North Carolina with a history as a technological early adopter was one of the first television stations to establish a World Wide Web presence and the first to begin broadcasting a digital signal. This paper is a historical and descriptive overview of WRAL OnLine's evolving Web site design as a reflection (or social construction) of the company's identity and its relationship with the community.

This paper explores the transition from one sort of recorded conversation -- the table-talk -- to the emergence of a new sort -- the interview -- and argues for the latter's importance in late twentieth century arts and the humanities. 

The New Literacy Project is a collaboration between USC's School of Cinema-Television and the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Working with select LAS faculty, the project integrates new media into traditional humanities courses with the goal not just of making students technically proficient but of transforming ideas of "expression" and "substance" themselves. The presentation will report on the first year of the project, with particular focus on the issues to arise when attempting such interdisciplinary collaboration.

After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes of 1685, which ended roughly one hundred years of limited toleration of French Protestantism, groups of peasants, shepherds and wool carders of the Cevennes, an area of southern France, sparked a religious revival in which, initially, young girls began trance-preaching, exhorting their followers to repent of their sins and expect the Day of Judgment. Their eschatological fervor soon attracted followers who gathered in secret, often outdoor locations. These secret Protestant assemblies alarmed Catholic and royal officials who attempted to suppress the gatherings. Their efforts at suppression failed and led in 1702 to Louis XIV's War of the Cevennes.

This paper does not address the actual religious revival of the Camisards, as these poor peasants and others came to be called, but focuses instead on the literate appropriation of the Camisard cause. The north European press seems to have been obsessed with the Camisards and their cause for roughly twenty five years. I examine what I've divided -- according to both generic and chronological criteria -- into three groups of printed sources on the Camisards. The first accompanies the original religious revival, often takes the form of compilations of testimonies, and reflects what Habermas and others have seen as a precursor to the independent public sphere. The second group is the mass of propaganda addressing the War of Cevennes:  an international, educated, Protestant class criticizing what are presented as the tyrannical abuses of the French king, who himself hires writers and other propagandists to take part in the debate. The third group dates from 1706 when a small group of Camisards made their way to London and attracted followers there. Hundreds of pamphlets and books appeared in just a four-year period in London, reflecting a public preoccupation with the appropriate sources of religious authority. At issue was the fact that the Camisards were illiterate and their religious message was passed on orally, rather than through the printed Bible interpreted by educated ministers.

So this paper addresses an international debate in the printed media at a time when the relationship between the press and political authorities was itself a controversial subject. It also addresses the relationship between print culture and oral culture, since the subjects of the debate -- and, in fact, some of the participants -- were a group of illiterate peasants. 

Modern publishers and readers alike have understood the book as a special communications medium within an increasingly competitive media environment. Beginning with the anti-advertising rhetoric that publishers adopted at the turn of the century, and continuing into the present, this paper explores our collective understanding of the book's difference from the media around it. I argue that this image, which begins with the book industry itself, but is sustained by popular ideas about books and reading, affords books a unique position within twentieth-century cultural politics. 

This paper will trace the discussions in trade journal Publishers' Weekly over the various drafts of the NIRA code. It will focus on three major issues: price controls, new leisure time, and libraries, and how discussions of these issues tried to balance practical concerns with publishers' and booksellers' desire to appear high minded and beneficial to American culture. Not only do these discussions outline the book industry's efforts at defining their mission, they also show how publishers and sellers hoped the government might add new legitimacy to the value of culture. While publishers and booksellers may have been anxious about government involvement in their industry, many used the formation of the NIRA codes to express the industry's desire to buttress the value of cultural products at a time when ordinary citizens could no longer afford such luxuries. 

Those who are "mediating and partly shaping technological change" in media, have to think about the consequences these transitions have for their own foundations.

Media scientists face a dramatic situation as the blueprint of their unifying subject, mass communication e.g. mass media, is becoming more and more diffuse. Additionally, the converging and diverging media attract strong interest from various other areas of scholarship.

This report offers a status quo on the topics German media studies is dealing with,  and identifies the academic disciplines which offer special potential for innovative work in the field of computer mediated communications.

The paper uses Plato's Phaedrus to examine the issue of change in media technology. In "Phaedrus," Socrates narrates an Egyptian story in which writing is cast in a problematic light, and tries to narrow areas in which written texts may circulate. This paper addresses Socrates' anxieties about writing, new technology, and foreignness, and tries to give historical perspective to the discussion of new media.

As technological advances in communication at the approach of the millennium expand contact zones and reconfigure perceptions of the world and its peoples, it is useful to compare and learn from the impact of similar phenomena a century ago, when the currents of globalization combined with unprecedented mass media penetration and the ascendance of visual aspects of media to create significant changes in the way Americans conceptualized their place in the world.

The paper charts the development of the Internet in Cuba, a reluctant and necessary step, that is complicated by the historical moment. As Cuba reinserts itself into a global marketplace, it does so when information technologies recreate the way business is done. And while the topic of the Internet is taboo, it is not ignored in the Helms-Burton law which seeks to improve telecommunications with the island in order to increase the potential for change.

Globalization is creating a new kind of 'public sphere' which challenges traditional definitions and conceptions. This paper will map the parameters of this emerging worldwide political community and the new (satellite- and cyber-) media environments that enable it.

In providing access to resources once restricted to a few, the World Wide Web has seriously challenged established authority in many fields. In most periods of history, information exchange and access is in reality an information hegemony -- knowledge carefully controlled and manipulated by elite groups, who thus gain power and status as experts. As with earlier  technical innovations, the World Wide Web threatens to disrupt the established relationship between information and the Expert Paradigm. This paper will compare the shocks the Web has brought to the Expert in three areas: political journalism, the visual arts, and intellectual property. 

New media technologies incite powerful ambivalences in their earliest users. However, it is this resistance to new media that helps to shape media forms (the novel, the television sitcom) and the media practices (absorptive reading for pleasure, being a "couch potato). My comparative account of these episodes in the articulation of print and television avoids a normalizing developmental model of media transition and offers some lessons for our ongoing development of the Internet as an infrastructure for humanities knowledge. 

This paper considers the phenomenon of the virtual museum, or that site at which traditional museum spaces and practices mix and merge with those made possible by new media and technologies. In particular, the paper investigates the shifting semiotics of representing museum objects themselves -- from indexical to symbolic, from atomic to digital -- under the developing logics of the virtual museum, and the effects such shifts might have on the informational, pedagogic, and aesthetic experiences of engagement with virtual exhibitions of those objects.

Recent scholarship on the state of the contemporary museum has begun to address a significant transformation occurring within the institution's spaces: the galleries are rapidly becoming multimedia sites of display, incorporating the moving image into a wide variety of exhibitions. My paper offers one of many possible "pre-histories" for this shift, focusing on the effect of video art installations on viewing practices and displays within the museum space.

My presentation proposes a model for understanding the design of play across digital and non-digital media. Designed play is a multivalent experience which can be framed along three axes:

1. RULES: the formal structures, spaces, and objects of play
2. PLAY: the play experience that emerges when the rules are inhabited, manipulated, and explored by players
3. CULTURE: the ways in which both rules and play are embedded in and determined by larger cultural spheres

 Aided by plenty of audience participation, I will explore and reframe play in many ways: as a dynamic system, as emergent complexity, as pleasure, as representational space, and as a model for ethics. My presentation is part of a larger project of establishing a critical discourse for interactive design that bridges theory and practice.