Research

Summary

My research interests are in the proliferation of ambient socio-digital systems. In particular, I am interested in the notion of an internet of things and its implications for human subjectivity and memory. This is an important area of inquiry because of the challenges posed by ubiquitous computing to hitherto axiomatic notions of sociality and identity. My broad research interests also include locative media social mapping projects, and the utility of process philosophy for describing a networked paradigm of progressively fluid identities.

Research to date

My research to date can be summarised as an examination of mobile socio-technical assemblages with the toolkit of actor network theory (ANT). This research agenda culminated in my doctoral dissertation titled The Politics of Networks: Using Actor Network Theory to Trace Techniques, Collectives and Space/Times , and is supplemented by my publications and conference presentations.  My research includes studies of activist collectives online, which I see as examples of fluid network identities; studies of ANT and its potential for internet and new media research; and studies of locative media cartography with an eye on its potential for discovering and tracing new urban collectivities. Currently I am updating and preparing my doctoral dissertation for publication.

I view the development of an ANT projection for studying mobile socio-technical assemblages as the most important aspect of my research to date. Key to this reasoning is the specific nature of the ANT apparatus in that distinctions between entities are not hardwired into the projection, but appear as an effect of the relations between entities. The main importance of this approach lies in its capacity to encounter the fluid complexity of network assemblages without assigning subject-object relationalities beforehand. Furthermore, I believe my work on case studies of activist collectives and locative media projects illustrates the utility of the projection in practice.

In the context of new media studies, the importance of this new projection concerns the ability to hold together a plenist world of agencies; that means tracing the shifts of agencies as they cross from human, to nonhuman, technical, imaginary, and partial entities. In turn, the ability to hold these heterogeneous entities in the same projection, allows tracing them in a potentially common assemblage, and establishing them as a public. From that perspective, new media studies become capable of tracing the intricate logistics of network public assemblages, without ever falling into a discourse of mastery; that I believe is an important achievement.

My research methodology to date has closely followed the approach pioneered by ANT. ANT extends with equal intensity the research apparatus of classical semiology to both the sciences and humanities. In that sense, ANT is not a theory of the social, but a purposefully simplified projection allowing tracing entities without imposing on them and world-building projection. As an example, in my research I argue that politics is not an a priori structure (as in ‘the body politic’) within which actor relations are played out, but a rare occasion in which a public manages to gather around an issue. Concomitantly, tracing case studies of the formation of network publics becomes, as I reason, a case of identifying network actors, following their shifts through networks, and analysing the spaces and times produced through these detours.

My thesis was inspired by the 1999 events in Seattle and started as a study of the use of new media by activist collectives (Mitew, 2005b). I developed further my thinking by studying the various new media conceptualisations of network fluidity (Mitew, 2005a), locative media mapping (Mitew, 2006), and the social implications of networked spatio-temporalities (Mitew, 2007, 2008; Mitew, Leong, Celletti, & Pearson, 2009). The new repertoire suggested by my thesis re-constructs network politics as the outcome of the spatio-temporal shifts of publics within a plenist ontology. For the resulting projection network politics are populated by assemblages constantly struggling for survival against dissociative agencies, within settings permeated by multiple spatio-temporalities.

These findings have given direction to my current research interests, expressed in my work on two exploratory papers: Societies of Humans and Others: Tarde, Whitehead, and the internet of things in which I attempt to further examine the utility of Gabriel Tarde’s sociology and A.N. Whitehead’s process philosophy for studying the effects of ubiquitous computing on conceptualizations of self; and A Little Philosophy of Crossings: approaching mobile publics through the work of Michel Serres, which attempts to use Michel Serres’ ‘philosophy of crossings’ to study mobile publics. This problematic is closely related to a more general plateau of convergences between technology, society, and culture in a networked urban environment which forms the crux of my research interests for the future.

Ambient socio-digital systems:

My future research interests are in studying the proliferation and implications of ambient socio-digital systems (ASDS). I define ASDS as ambient connectivity enabling ad-hoc human-machine or human-object assemblages. Rudimentary examples of important aspects of such systems can be observed in Beatriz Da Costa’s Pigeonblog project, or Christian Nold’s Biomapping project, both discussed at length in Mitew (2008). On a more specific level, my interests lie in studying and theorising the influence of ASDS on human memory and conceptualisation of self. For example, based on current trends in storage and networking, there is an easily identifiable tendency for the externalisation of memories (Facebook, Flickr, Picasa). For now, these memory-locales are only accessible through stationary PC’s or mobile devices. What if the connectivity to those memory-locales became fully ambient and ubiquitous? In other words, what will be the effects of progressively externalised and ambient memory-locales for the human notions of identity and a larger social?