Stream Description:
This stream invites contributions on issues of digital cultural practice. The call is not limited to examination of online practice alone, but is designed to attract a breadth of submissions that explore bridging the ubiquity of technological uptake as it flows across a breadth of spatial configurations (for example in the workplace, the domestic and public spheres, social engagements and entertainment). As technologies continue to spill over from the workplace into daily life and vice versa, our everyday practices encompass contemporary uses of technology. In fact, it is increasingly difficult to extricate work and social uses of the patchwork of existing and emerging technologies that permeate our lives.

Issues may include (but are not confined to):
1. critical issues of digital culture: practices of online life, for example dealing with complication, agility, ambience and proliferation of technology; implications for the workplace (like fragmentation of jobs with new media uptake, virtual artefacts, Web 2.0 and differentiations); procedurisation of innovation; meaning and utility of management standards both online and offline; sophistication of managerial control and automation of physical control of time, information access, communication and moving.
2. empowerment stands out as an important issue, discussions of equalities and inequalities, the slowing down and speeding up of experience and life in the digitised environment; topics without satisfactory answers to questions about examination of change, if any, in the distribution of power and its beneficiaries in the course of technological exchange; why capacities, capabilities and opportunities provided by technology are more or less empowering
3. reflexivities between the studies of digital culture and IT: analyses of how discourses around digital culture affect use of technology and how discourses of digital culture affect the study of IT (for example the role of ethics, disembodied interviewing, musicology and so on); textual analyses for the digitised research and code and advances for IT/IS development methods; metaphors in application of scientific methods (like in complexity and emergence discipline); ways in which methodological approaches in each field can inform each other.
4. links between digital cultures and previous technology cultures: comparisons between past impacts of technology on daily life (such as internal combustion engine, telephone, sewing machine) and current impact of digital technologies; maker cultures - past, present and future - in art, craft and technology; technology as owned product or consumed service, then and now - travelling photographer/ ubiquitous cameraphone, community use of baker's oven for Boulangère Potatoes/ fast food, travelling Magic Lantern shows/ digital television.

We welcome panel discussion proposals and other proposals on innovative use of presentation time to explore the theme of this stream.

Details of the Convenors:

Convenor 1: Anita Greenhill
University of Manchester
a.greenhill@manchester.ac.uk

Convenor 2: Frances Bell
University of Salford
f.bell@salford.ac.uk
Convenor 3: Gordon Fletcher,
University of Salford
g.fletcher@salford.ac.uk

Convenor 4: Marie Griffiths
University of Salford
m.griffith@salford.ac.uk

Convenor 5: Rachel McLean
University of Bolton
r.mclean@bolton.ac.uk