[ecrea] New Fibreculture Journal issue—Apps and Affect

We are delighted to announce the publication of Issue 25—Apps and
Affect. This is issue was edited by Svitlana Matviyenko, Nandita Biswas
Mellamphy, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Alison Hearn, and, from the journal's
side, Andrew Murphie. Â

You can read online, or download individual or issue pdfs or epubs here:

http://twentyfive.fibreculturejournal.org/

FCJ-179 On Governance, Blackboxing, Measure, Body, Affect and Apps: A
conversation with Patricia Ticineto Clough and Alexander R.
Galloway—Svitlana Matviyenko, Patricia Ticineto Clough & Alexander R
Galloway

FCJ-180 ‘Spotify Has Added an Event to Your Past’: (Re)writing the
Self through Facebook’s Autoposting Apps—Tanya Kant

FCJ-181 There’s a History for That: Apps and Mundane Software as
Commodity—Jeremy Wade Morris and Evan Elkins

FCJ-182 Middlebroware—Frédérik Lesage

FCJ-183 iHootenanny: A Folk Archeology of Social Media—Henry Adam Svec

FCJ-184 Interpassive User: Complicity and the Returns of
Cybernetics—Svitlana Matviyenko

FCJ-185 An Algorithmic Agartha: Post-App Approaches to Synarchic
Regulation—Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy

FCJ-186 Hack for good: Speculative labour, app development and the
burden of austerity—Melissa Gregg

FCJ-187 The Droning of Experience—Mark Andrejevic

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This issue of the Fibreculture Journal explores a moment along this
hypothetical trajectory by investigating the contemporary
intersection of ‘Apps and Affect’, publishing papers from a
conference of that name organised in October 2013 by faculty and
students at Western University (specifically from its Faculty of
Information and Media Studies and Center for the Study of Theory and
Criticism). By recognising apps as objects that are related to the
constitution of subjects, as a component of biopolitical assemblages,
and as a means of digital production and consumption, our conference
aimed to make an intervention in what had – since the announcements of
the App-Store and the iPhone3 in 2008 – been a largely technical and
rather technophiliac public discussion of apps.

Isn’t it paradoxical, we asked, that instead of becoming
‘transparent’ and ‘invisible’ – as envisioned 
by the thinkers
of ubiquitous computing decades ago – the app-ecosystem manifests
itself as permanent excess: excessive downloads, excessive connections,
excessive proximity, excessive ‘friends’-qua-‘contacts’,
excessive speeds and excessive amounts of information? How does
the app as ‘technique’ (Tenner), indeed as ‘cultural 
technique’
(Siegert) and as ‘technics’ (Stiegler), channel our ways of
maintaining relations with/in the media environment? Do the specific and
circumscribed operations of individual applications foster or foreclose
what media theorists call the transformative and transductive potential
of collective technological individuation (Simondon)? How might we think
about the social, political and technical implications of this movement
away from open-ended networks like the internet towards specific,
focused, and individualised modes of computing? Do apps represent ‘a
new reticular condition of trans-individuation grammatising new forms of
social relations’ (Stiegler) or do they signal instead the
triumph of ‘regulatory’ networks over ‘generative’ ones
(Zittrain)? If apps are micro-programs residing by the hundreds and
thousands on cell-phones, mobile-devices and tablets, and affects are
corporeal excitements (and depressions) running beneath and beyond
cognition, what is the relation of apps to affects?

—the Editors

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