[Air-L] CFP - M/C - "obsolete"

[Jason Wilson]

Dear Colleagues, 

Please find below a call for papers for M/C - issue theme 'obsolete'. 

For more information on this issue, email obsolete at journal.media-culture.org.au, or contact the editors directly. 

More information on m/c can be found at the m/c website http://media-culture.org.au

'obsolete'
"Obsolescence is the leading product of our national infatuation with technology."
-- Jonathan Franzen, in “Scavenging” 
Since digital technologies have emerged as a focus for media and cultural studies, so too has an overwhelming concern with the new. New media scholarship often veers between utopian, pessimistic and “revolutionary” accounts of the “newest” media and practices. But newness is relative, and must be seen in relation to its opposite, obsolescence. 
 
Specific technologies’ passages to obsolescence are not sudden, but stealthy and gradual – Sterne and other scholars point out that obsolescence comes after extended periods where newness fades in the historical life of technologies, and the obsolete can be redeemed. Obsolescence is usually reversible, as nostalgia industries work to resuscitate the cultural value of faded technologies (for example, seeking out the “analogue” as a marker of distinction). Obsolescence can mean the supersession of the technological capacities of a technology – as in the replacement of analogue phone networks – or the phasing out of particular uses of a technology – as in the earliest videogames’ demonstration to audiences of the potential of television beyond its uses as a channel for broadcasting. Observing persistent use of obsolescent technologies can reveal social divides, or determined resistance to the onward march of technology. In a world
 increasingly preoccupied with environmental concerns, technologies’ structural obsolescence has broader ramifications. 
 
This issue of M/C Journal seeks accounts of how old technologies survive, how and why people preserve or make do with them, and tales of the shadings and gradations between the latest thing and yesterday’s gadget, between retro-chic and junk.

The concept of the obsolete raises a range of questions. In aesthetics: how do technologies and texts pass from the sublime “new”, to the ugliness of obsolescence, to the recovered beauty of the collectable and the antique. In policy terms, what of the large numbers of people struggling on with obsolete communication technologies, on obsolete networks? Is policy and scholarship biased to early adopters? More critically, how does the constant contemporary production of obsolescence square with an ethics of waste? Does the distinction struggled over by early adopters reveal something about other divides – the city and the country, class, gender? 
Details
	* Article deadline: 8 May 2009 
	* Release date: 1 July 2009 
	* Editors: Jason Jacobs and Jason Wilson
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to obsolete at journal.media-culture.org.au.

Dr Jason Wilson 
Lecturer in Digital Media 
School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication 
University of Wollongong 
NSW, Australia, 2515 

e jasonw at uow.edu.au 
t (+61) (0)2 42213088 
skype jason_a_w 

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http://gatewatching.org 


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