With the development of gestural interfaces in entertainment media such as the Wii and Xbox's ... 'that his new iPhone contained photographs of a smiling woman on an iPhone ... Game play provides a fertile field for developing models of.
Editorial
Gestural interfaces
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17(3) 235–236 ª The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1354856511412455 con.sagepub.com
Anthropologists and ethnologists have analysed the meaning of gestures placing them within a broader context of social communication and shown how gestures mediated by technology have their own meaning. For example we wave and smile at day trippers on the river, because a wave accompanied by a smile mitigates the seeming hostility of our looking, which is invariably more than a glance, and usually verges on a stare, as we watch them go by. Yet, in the early days of documentary filmmaking the camera recorded many an inquisitorial stare as subjects viewed the technology with puzzlement. They reacted to a camera and not to the audience who, albeit at one remove, were viewing them. Today this behaviour seems quaint, as we have learnt the meaning of the mediated gesture and how to perform before the camera. But clearly such meanings are not fixed and change with time and with different technologies. Compare for example the reactions of the subjects of early films who show curiosity by coming closer, or hostility by raising a hand to block the lens. Today we understand such gestures when they appear on the news as a desire for privacy, or the concealment of identity. With the development of gestural interfaces in entertainment media such as the Wii and Xbox’s Kinect, and with the uptake of haptic mobile technology from GPS to smart phones, it is important to explore how meanings are embedded in the interface and what they signify. In the excitement about the liberatory potential of such new media technologies it is easy to neglect difficult issues about the inscription of cultural ideology in the iconography of the interface. Philippa Jones’s debate piece in this issue offers a reflective insight into the ideological connotations of the computer’s pointing-finger icon with which we are now all so familiar. Jones defamiliarizes the icon for us, deconstructing the assumption of right handedness and associations of colour and graphic genre embedded within it. She helpfully points out how ‘many digital artists have made it their business to subvert the normal mechanisms of interactivity’ and confront the user with the difficulties of investing meaning in technogesticulation. Research into online identity is now entering into the area of the performance of self through action and gesture as well as in the construction of avatars. Seth Perlow and Casey O’Donnell’s research articles in this issue extend these interests by looking at industry practices rather than the interface. Perlow’s article takes as its starting point the incident in 2008 when a British man found ‘that his new iPhone contained photographs of a smiling woman on an iPhone assembly line in China’. The iPhone girl, as she became known in the press, brought into the spotlight those that build our electronic gadgets. The aspirations embodied in the technology, the conditions of employment of those on the production line, and the dynamics of global trade all came under scrutiny. As Perlow states ‘New media criticism has a major stake in user-embodiment but has largely neglected this other set of bodies: those that build our electronic gadgets’. While Perlow’s article provides insight into the conditions of manufacture of mobile phones, others have sought to give us an understanding of the complexity of modern cross-media production practice. This was a
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Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17(3)
recurring concern in our recent special issue on adaptations, cross-media practices and branded entertainment (17[1]), but is addressed again in this issue by Casey O’Donnell who undertakes a very useful analysis of cross-media development practice and the labour involved in the effect of media ‘flow’ from platform to platform. Daniel Ashton and Lina Ekland’s research articles continue the concern with the performance of self, but approach the subject from two very different perspectives. On the one hand, Ashton’s work explores the connections between the practice of ‘upgrading the self’ and the attitude to usercreativity in the perpetual innovation economy of digital gaming, On the other, Ekland explores the interscription of queer performance in the female avatar’s enaction of embedded masculine rules in the online game World of Warcraft. Game play provides a fertile field for developing models of analysis of participatory practice, which are frequently employed to provide insight into social media. However this can, of course, go badly wrong when game play is misread. Nathan Dutton, Mia Consalvo and Todd Harper’s article cites the incident in 2008, when a report on the Xbox 360 video game Mass Effect was picked up by Fox News’ ‘Live Desk with Martha MacCallum’ and guest Cooper Lawrence, who – with little knowledge of the game – described it as interactive digital pornography. Angry fans responded in various ways, and Dutton and his co-authors analyse their actions in forum discussions, YouTube videos, and the ‘review bombing’ of Cooper Lawrence’s books on Amazon.com. Finally in this issue we have reviews of the most recent edition of Curran and Seaton’s stalwart of the curriculum Power without Responsibility by Zemirah Moffat, and Charlotte Frost’s consideration of Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook’s thought-provoking Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media. Julia Knight University of Sunderland Alexis Weedon University of Bedfordshire
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