Ken Hillis | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (original) (raw)

Books by Ken Hillis

by Chris Lukinbeal, Laura Sharp, John Finn, lynn spigel, Stuart Aitken, Michael Curtin, Leon Gurevitch, Leo E Zonn, Ken Hillis, Keith Woodward, and Christina Beal Kennedy

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-017-9969-0 This is the first comprehensive volume ... more https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-017-9969-0

This is the first comprehensive volume to explore and engage with current trends in Geographies of Media research. It reviews how conceptualizations of mediated geographies have evolved. Followed by an examination of diverse media contexts and locales, the book illustrates key issues through the integration of theoretical and empirical case studies, and reflects on the future challenges and opportunities faced by scholars in this field. The contributions by an international team of experts in the field, address theoretical perspectives on mediated geographies, methodological challenges and opportunities posed by geographies of media, the role and significance of different media forms and organizations in relation to socio-spatial relations, the dynamism of media in local-global relations, and in-depth case studies of mediated locales. Given the theoretical and methodological diversity of this book, it will provide an important reference for geographers and other interdisciplinary scholars working in cultural and media studies, researchers in environmental studies, sociology, visual anthropology, new technologies, and political science, who seek to understand and explore the interconnections of media, space and place through the examples of specific practices and settings.

Google and The Culture of Search The rise of Google as the dominant internet search provider ref... more Google and The Culture of Search

The rise of Google as the dominant internet search provider reflects a generationally-inflected notion that everything that matters is now on the Web, and should, in the moral sense of the verb, be accessible through search. Google and The Culture of Search offers a theoretically nuanced study of search technology’s broader implications for knowledge production and social relations. Even as it becomes the number one internet activity, the very ubiquity of search technology naturalizes it as utilitarian and transparent. Hillis et al, therefore, shed light on a culture of search in which our increasing reliance on search engines influences not only the way we navigate, classify, and evaluate Web content, but also how we think about ourselves and the world around us, online and off. The book explores what is at stake for an increasingly networked culture in which search technology is a site of knowledge and power and argues that the biases and individuating tendencies of search algorithms shape our collective experience of the internet and our assumptions about the location and value of information. Commercial search engines supply an infrastructure that impacts the way we locate, prioritize, classify, and archive information on the Web, and as these search functionalities continue to make their way into our lives through mobile, GPS-based platforms and personalized results, distinctions between the virtual and the real collapse. By historicizing and contextualizing Google’s dominance of the search industry, chapters assess the ascendancy of search and its naturalization, and argue that the contemporary culture of search is inextricably bound up with a longstanding metaphysical longing to manage, order, and categorize all knowledge into one universal database.

Book Chapters by Ken Hillis

Placing Scale. Andrew Herod and Melissa Wright (Eds.). (pp.154-170). London: Blackwell. , 2002

Papers by Ken Hillis

Abstract: Though a few geographers have made communication the object of study, communication has... more Abstract: Though a few geographers have made communication the object of study, communication has been undertheorized by Anglo-American geographers. When considered, communication has often been conflated with transportation, or been subject to quantification at the expense of sustained analysis of its implications for people and places. The increasingly central sociospatial concerns raised by new digital information technologies, however, suggest the urgency for the discipline to re-evaluate a reluctance to engage with communication processes that, until lately, because of their relative invisibility, may have seemed naturalized or beyond the disciplinary purview. Ironically, new communication technologies, because of the visual representations in which they trade, allow social and human geography to incorporate study of communication without abandoning an empirical focus on the visible. Key words: communication, communication technologies, digital and visual representation. Commun...

of Los Angeles, as McClung suggests, is part of the city’s structure, part of its historical memo... more of Los Angeles, as McClung suggests, is part of the city’s structure, part of its historical memory and collective sense of self. Max Pensky, assessing Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the influence of new technologies on social forms during the early twentieth-century rise of Berlin to world city status, notes that, for Benjamin, “the metropolis can only signify the structure of collective experience and collective memory by virtue of the

What did you do before Google? The rise of Google as the dominant Internet search provider reflec... more What did you do before Google? The rise of Google as the dominant Internet search provider reflects a generationally-inflected notion that everything that matters is now on the Web, and should, in the moral sense of the verb, be accessible through search. In this theoretically nuanced study of search technology's broader implications for knowledge production and social relations, the authors shed light on a culture of search in which our increasing reliance on search engines influences not only the way we navigate, classify, ...

Cultural Geographies, 1994

... http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/1/2/177.citation The online version of this article can be fou... more ... http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/1/2/177.citation The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/147447409400100204 1994 1: 177 Cultural Geographies Ken Hillis The Virtue of Becoming a No-Body ... Ken Hillis he voice is assured, the phrase familiar to millions. ...

Geographies of Power

This chapter analyzes the United States Virtual Trade Mission (VTM), a public/private media strat... more This chapter analyzes the United States Virtual Trade Mission (VTM), a public/private media strategy developed to indoctrinate US students in the values of globalization as defined by US multinational com-panies such as General Electric, Boeing, Hughes Electronics, TRW, ...

From the Publisher: Ken Hillis is assistant professor of communication studies at the University ... more From the Publisher: Ken Hillis is assistant professor of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine , C... more Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine , Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

This chapter contains sections titled: Affect: Definitional and Theoretical Encounters, Internet ... more This chapter contains sections titled: Affect: Definitional and Theoretical Encounters, Internet Studies and Affect, Writing Affect, Intensity, Sensation, and Value, Note, References

Networked Affect

This chapter contains sections titled: Virtual Space and Telepresence, Indexical Signs, Sign/Bodi... more This chapter contains sections titled: Virtual Space and Telepresence, Indexical Signs, Sign/Bodies, Mobility, Whither Affective Agency, Note, References

Our encounters with websites, avatars, videos, mobile apps, discussion forums, GIFs, and nonhuman... more Our encounters with websites, avatars, videos, mobile apps, discussion forums, GIFs, and nonhuman intelligent agents allow us to experience sensations of connectivity, interest, desire, and attachment -- as well as detachment, boredom, fear, and shame. Some affective online encounters may arouse complex, contradictory feelings that resist dualistic distinctions. In this book, leading scholars examine the fluctuating and altering dynamics of affect that give shape to online connections and disconnections. Doing so, they tie issues of circulation and connectivity to theorizations of networked affect. Their diverse investigations -- considering subjects that range from online sexual dynamics to the liveliness of computer code -- demonstrate the value of affect theories for Internet studies. The contributors investigate networked affect in terms of intensity, sensation, and value. They explore online intensities that range from Tumblr practices in LGBTQ communities to visceral reactions to animated avatars; examine the affective materiality of software in such platforms as steampunk culture and nonprofit altporn; and analyze the ascription of value to online activities including the GTD ("getting things done") movement and the accumulation of personal digital materials. ContributorsJames Ash, Alex Cho, Jodi Dean, Melissa Gregg, Ken Hillis, Kylie Jarrett, Tero Karppi, Stephen Maddison, Susanna Paasonen, Jussi Parikka, Michael Petit, Jennifer Pybus, Jenny Sundn, Veronika Tzankova

Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space and Relations. …, 1999

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published m... more Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: My Obsession: I Thought I Was Immune to the Net. Then I Got Bitten by eBay. by William Gibson was originally published in Wired 7, no. 1 (January 1999). Copyright © 1999 by ...

Geography, 2003

This paper offers a critique of Hewlett-Packard's ‘Cooltown’, a web-based vision of a near fu... more This paper offers a critique of Hewlett-Packard's ‘Cooltown’, a web-based vision of a near future organized according to the logic of ubiquitous mobile technologies. We argue that Cooltown is prototypical of 1. utopian corporate discourses that frame mobile technologies as only enhancing human agency and subjectivity and 2. the type of ICT ecosystems that new mobile technologies are increasingly designed to engender. Though seemingly benign, the continual surveillance to which people ‘in’ Cooltown are subject in exchange for their access to the technologies Cooltown will deploy renders such individuals more amenable than ever before to being managed through these technologies as spatio-temporal coordinates in the machine of global capital. In response to this quasi-surrender of agency and control that for us Cooltown entails, we argue for a politics of place, choice, and resistance in the burgeoning Mobile World and for additional critical scholarship and alternative practices w...