Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of Everyday Life

Caren Kaplan has created a super cool 3D graphic novel that 6 parallel stories inside an interactive cube - brilliant!

"Welcome to Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of "Everyday" Life. I'm Caren Kaplan and I created this multimedia piece in collaboration with Erik Loyer and Ezra Clayton Daniels, with funding in large part from the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship.

This project began many years ago in 1994 when I happened to read something in The New York Times about a new technology that could help a sight-impaired person get from one place to another. The article described a backpack-sized device that would use something called the "global positioning system" or "GPS" to locate precisely the person's whereabouts and then link to a voice-guided mapping service. Using GPS, someone who couldn't see could move about independently at will. I thought this sounded really exciting and I clipped the story out of the paper, thinking I could use it in a class I was planning to teach on theories and practices of mobility. But before I could go much further, I needed to know more about this new technology, GPS.

To my surprise, my first online search for GPS brought me hundreds of hits concerning the military and the 1st Persian Gulf War. This piqued my interest and the next thing I knew I was researching military technology, satellite programs, and the history of air power. And I have been pursuing these topics ever since—although it took me awhile to understand how my new interests were not a deviation from my studies of postcolonial travel and gender but, rather, the best way for me to grasp the links between culture, politics, and economics through the concrete example of militarization.

GPS was always envisioned as a "dual-use" technology; that is, available for both military and civilian use. Throughout the 1990s, the same technology that had guided the so-called "smart bombs" to targets in Iraq, became mainstreamed into everyday life in the U.S: mapping auto routes, identifying consumer groups, keeping track of children, and entertaining us through games and applications. GPS entered the late 20th century social imaginary and changed people's perceptions about space and time, especially the power of identifying increasingly precise locations and the pleasures of personal electronics. Of course, in the post-9/11 era, anxieties about national security and borders of all kinds have generated new conversions of GPS and allied technologies such as biometrics. Thus, the circulation of GPS between military and civilian use is instructive if we want to understand better the ways in which government and business cooperate not only to make war but to create consumers. Most importantly, in this way, people who have no particular interest in military projects or nationalism may find themselves through their use of technology in everyday life participating in the culture of war: through ways of seeing, forms of entertainment, and modes of communication.

My study of GPS in this era of seemingly endless war has led me to ask how "dual-use" technologies blur the distinction between military and civilian spheres. What are our expectations and assumptions about information technologies? How can we say "no" to war when we say "yes" to militarization every single day? Precision Targets is designed to raise these questions and others as you move through the multimedia piece to engage the animated possibilities of GPS in everyday life."

PepperDigital: Transforming Collaboration and Creativity across Divides

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April 23, 2010

Transforming Collaboration and Creativity across Divides

By: Sam Ford, PepperDigital

Last night, my mentor--Henry Jenkins--spoke at the university at an event that has many surrounding media studies at "the Institute" talking, if Twitter is any indication. And, while his comments are directed at the creativity but also the challenges of work relationships within that particular university, I believe his words have great implications for professionals across multiple divisions of a company, for the public relations field as a whole, and for how various entities have conversations with one another in general--the collaboration between academia and the media industries/brands; the collaboration between newsmakers and news "consumers" (a word that I think greatly misunderstands the transformative role we all play in both spreading and shaping civic communication); and a variety of other "interdisciplinary" conversations.

Jenkins, who I am currently co-authoring Spreadable Media with (along with Joshua Green at UC-Santa Barbara), left MIT after two decades for the University of Southern California, a move from an institution where the humanities is undervalued to an institution where studying the media is a major focus of the school's reputation. Last night's talk captured the conflicting feelings many of us have about MIT--an environment that shaped who we have become as professionals even as it created deep frustrations along the way about the rigidity of certain disciplinary boundaries, even as MIT's strength has long come from collaboration across divisions. Henry used a familiar MIT to sum this up--IHTFP--but I'll let you readers look up what that initialism stands for. But his talk's implications spread far beyond the particular boundaries of MIT, particularly two fundamental messages.

First, we can't treat making things and thinking about things as mutually exclusive. That doesn't mean some people won't be more applied than others. Obviously, we need some people who are largely charged with watching what's happening, thinking about culture, studying the history of media, deeply listening to the audience, and who bring that knowledge to bear on the current moment. We also need people who are largely charged with putting thinking to action. But the idea that "strategy" and "tactics" are unconnected to each other, that the people who do "strategy" work should do little to think about how it will pragmatically be implemented or that the people who do tactical work should not be expected to think strategically at all is ridiculous. We see enough of that happen within the media industries and the agency world. And we see that happen all too often in the academy--a lack of conversations across disciplines between the "studies" and the "practical" majors. That's not to even talk about the lack of communication between the academic world, which deeply studies the trends taking place in a culture from a variety of perspectives, and the media industries, which are going to drive the implementation of the tools, narratives, and material available to our culture to discuss, spread, and contribute to.

This is the focus of Grant McCracken's writing in Chief Culture Officer. It's what many of us who graduated from the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT are seeking to do in our own work. Henry charged several sectors of MIT at being guilty of making things without thinking about their usefulness in any way. In that sense, it's an example of putting major technological innovation into something that may serve very little usefulness for the culture as a whole, for thinking little about the social and human elements not just of getting technology adopted but of making the technology really resonate within its cultural context. But, beyond that danger of creating technology with little thought to how it will meet the needs and wants of people or communities, there's also the danger when making without thinking of creating content that's just not that compelling, messages that have no resonance and that no one will want to put in motion. In the Hollywood context now that he's at USC, Henry talks about creating "transmedia" narratives as being a great creative potential that we've only scratched the surface of but, conversely, of the danger that Hollywood might use it as an excuse to create more crap for people to buy when "the dung heap" of Hollywood is piled high enough already. Marketers, public relations professionals, and advertising creatives can fall into the same trap, especially in the social media space, where often the "strategy" is scarcely more than the tactic itself, a victim of making without much thinking.

There's also the danger of thinking without relationship to doing. Henry captures also the strength of the MIT model and how I believe it helped prepare those of us who came from the Comparative Media Studies program to make contributions to both the media industries and the academy through the idea of "applied humanities." While the humanist should be a critic of our culture and many of the players within it, "applied humanities" calls for thinking through the value of collaboration between the industry and the academy, of taking the knowledge within the humanities and the insights humanities research creates and giving access to those doing related work outside academic walls. Applied research is at the heart of MIT but not traditionally at the heart of the academy, a reality that CMS and a variety of other academic programs at other institutions have sought to help correct.

Second, we can't become too constrained by discipline. Henry points out that the MIT seal puts the humanities and the sciences with their backs to one another, a narrative that has in many ways played out over the years within MIT's industrial walls. In Henry's talk, he alludes to the positives of "the discipline"--a body of work to draw from, a way of theorizing and training that is passed down, etc.--but also the negatives--the idea of constraint and punishment for breaking outside the box. The Comparative Media Studies program sought to draw not just between a mix of "thinking" and "doing" but also a mix of disciplinary backgrounds, from anthropologists and cultural theorists to business school types and professional communicators to historians and literature scholars. In the marketing and communication world, we see the lack of collaboration among professionals in a chosen field as the competitive mindset overtakes a collaborative one. We see a lack of collaboration among marketing disciplines, as advertising and public relations and other marketing forms see themselves in competition with one another for budgets. We see a lack of collaboration within brands, as departments compete for budgets and jurisdiction rather than working together to solve problems.

Today, CMS will be celebrating its 10th anniversary with a variety of panels, on the heels of Henry's talk last night. I was honored with having the chance to shape the agenda for today's events, and I'm looking forward to the perspectives of a mix of professors, research managers, and CMS alum talking about the nature of the applied humanities, the acceleration of participatory culture, the nature of global media flows, and the transformation of creativity and collaboration in a digital age. Sadly, there are way too many of us who can't be there for a variety of reasons. It speaks to the power of digital media to be able to have the podcast of last night's talk available to listen to immediately after the event was over. And I'm hoping that today's sessions will likewise be made available shortly (in part because, before circumstances arose that prevented my attendance, I was scheduled to speak on the "Creativity and Collaboration in a Digital Age" panel). I have a feeling, considering how many interested audiences weren't able to attend in person today, the event will be as valuable as a media artifact for discussion after the fact as it was a live event. The questions the CMS program has tackled over the past decade and that CMS and MIT will continue to tackle in the coming years have great implications not only beyond the walls of the Institute but far beyond the academic world as well.

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such a worth-while read!

Rule, fairy tale cartoon created in Sleep Is Death - Boing Boing

surprisingly affecting animation just up on Boing Boing - really charming:

"Inspired by an early Superbrothers animation and Rohrer's own memento mori game Passage, animator Simon Cottee created Rule, a life-to-death tale of an unnamed king composed, painted, and animated entirely in Jason Rohrer's Sleep is Death."

FITC // Storytelling X.0

What's it all about anyway? Why should I go?

This day is about connecting today’s best practices with future possibles and envisioning multiple ways that stories might be told. It will change the way you think, design and communicate.

Digital Storytelling X.0 brings together visionary thinkers and innovative trail blazers for an in-depth discussion of emergent trends, best practices, and inspiring projects, to sketch out ideas of where we may be heading next and how to make your projects part of those futures.

Who is this event for?

If you’re a digital creative wanting to make the experience of your projects richer, more engaging and more immersive or if you’re a film and/or tv content creator interested in working in the digital media industry, this day is for you, because slapping on a twitter feed or creating a character profile for your project is so last year’s update.

The Interactive Narratives Initiatives

The Storytelling X.0 symposium is one of four components of The Interactive Narratives Initiatives project. INI, a project conceived and developed by C3/Communitech in support of FITC and it's secondary partners, will be introducing to Ontarian storytellers a new software system that is a new way of telling stories. Shapeshifting Media Technology is the very latest in interactive content management software – by introducing a new media architecture featuring an adaptive nature that can change the users’ experiences on the fly during the playback of audiovisual content. In doing so, creators of audiovisual content in Ontario will be able to display their present content in a more engaging fashion than is possible with more traditional linear film or TV techniques.

INI is also made up of a series of events hosted by our secondary partners : Women in Film & Television (WIFT), Augmented Reality Lab at York University, CFC Media Lab, Communitech, Digital Arts & Technology Association (DATA), and the Writers Guild of Canada (WGC). INI is funded by the OMDC and lead by FITC.

For more information please contact Kathleen Webb.


FITC Background

FITC has produced events over 30 events over the last 9 years with over 15,000 attendees through 18 cities around the world. From Flash to Motion Design, Mobile and more, FITC events each stand as unique and exciting experiences that inspire, educate and challenge. We have also collaborated on dozens of other projects widening our scope and allowing us to bring you the best events out there when it comes to content, networking and of course great parties!

hey all! Storytelling X.O is almost here! hope to see you there!