Presider: Jay Owens (@hautepop)
Hashmod: Andrew Dever (@andrewdever)
This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Ref(user): Movements of Resistance
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Presider: Alyce Currier (@notalyce)
Hashmod: Lynette Yorgey Winslow (@yorglow)
This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Casual Encounters: Sex, Sexuality, and intimacy
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JoAnne McNeil (@jomc)
Hashmod: Lauren Burr (@burrlauren)
This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Streetview: Space, Place, and Geography
It is difficult, if not impossible to talk about the Web without using physical metaphors to describe digital configurations. “The Web” after all isn’t really a web at all… Or is it? Offices, hydroelectric dams, bodies, and miles upon miles of interconnecting strands of copper, fiber, and electromagnetic signals makeup this amorphous thing that we call The Web. The panelists in Streetview aren’t talking about metaphors but are actually illuminating and revealing the physical contents and infrastructure of the web. Sites that seem ephemeral and intangible to most of the world, are real flesh and mortar offices for a select few. It is this select few that gentrify entire metropolitan regions and run server farms that consume a city’s worth of fossil fuels. The Web is also deeply enmeshed in our own lives as it serves up wayfinding tools and documentation repositories.
Presider: Rachel Rosenfelt (@rachelrosenfelt)
Hashmod: Angela Chen (@chengela)
This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Discipline and Publish: The New Politics of Publishing
It is hard to overstate just how profoundly and completely the Web has changed publishing, both as a profession and as a set of technologies. Every major category of publishable content, from punk zines to encyclopedias has undergone massive changes and yet some things remain doggedly the same. Mastheads are still very white and male, (even the new ones) although some of the most intriguing and innovative publishing platforms are more representative of the world. Rachel Rosenfelt, founder and editor of The New Inquiry will preside over a panel of four presentations looking at how the politics of publishing are changing and what it means for authors, readers, and society in general. Ana Cecilia Alvarez and Joseph Staten investigate the apparent disconnect between the popularity of a topic, and any individual piece on that topic. Alvarez, looking at feminist writing on Tumblr and other social media platforms, asks the provocative and absolutely necessary question: “Feminism gets a lot of likes, but does this mean a lot of people like feminism?” Staten asks his audience to reconsider the thinkpiece and how it can be mobilized as a more effective tool for cultural critique. Matthew Clair and Mathias Klang consider the new kinds of ownership models and access systems that have cropped up over the years and outline their roles in expanding the control of private property. Clair takes a uniquely micro-level approach to studying neoliberalism within avante-garde writing communities and Klang discusses the implications of DRM on ebooks for both authors and readers. The panelists in Discipline and Publish approach this field with a critical eye towards the affordances and stated promises of new publishing technologies however, taken together, the panel paints a fairly optimistic picture of the future of publishing.
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Presider: Sarah Wanenchak (@dynamicsymmetry)
Hashmod: Amanda Brennan (@continuants)
This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled –––⁂–(⊗__⊗)–⁂–––: Drones, for better or worse
We’ve talked a lot about drones in the past couple of years, and with good reason. Not only are they a category of technology that’s expanding its presence beyond the more familiar context of warfare – not only not going away but proliferating like mad – but they’re also challenging us to think in new ways about our relationship with our machines. Where is the line between operator and drone? How do we construct that line? How does it blur? Is it there at all? Who is more subject to droning and who controls the drones? What are the stories we tell about drones, and what do those stories mean? What is our drone discourse? What can it do, and what are its limitations? How do we navigate it? What do we talk about when we talk about drones? What do we mean by drone, anyway?
We obviously can’t tackle all of these questions in a single panel, but we hope to address at least a few of the more pertinent ones. This is simply a fragment in a much larger, ongoing conversation. This fragment will be populated by Adam Rothstein, Olivia Rosane, James Bridle, and Eleanor Saitta, but the talking should not and cannot end there. Under the cut is a preview of that conversation, a short interview with the panelists.
Presider: Malcom Harris (@BigMeanInternet)
Hashmod: Heather Rosenfeld (@brainvom)
This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Mobilized: Actors and Activism
By now, we’re all familiar with the significance of the presence of social media in protest movements. Theorizing the Web has made them a focus since its inception. But one of the most important features of political resistance via social media and the web in general is that it’s constantly evolving. In order to understand that evolution, we need to be sensitive to the sheer diversity of the places in which we find an enormously diverse selection of forms of resistance. This panel highlights a few of these, ranging from mobilization in Kathmandu to the creation of queer micropublics in the American South to gendered labor “strikes” in social media to counterperformance against hegemonic identities on Reddit. These presentations incorporate instances of social media facilitating – and not facilitating – protest in physical spaces along with instances wherein resistance is taking place largely online. Again, the diversity of representation points the way forward to a deeper and richer understanding of how protest and resistance is organized and moves with the digital in play. more...
Presider: Jillet Sarah Sam (@JilletSarahSam)
Hashmod: Alice Samson (@theclubinternet)
This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled World Wide Web(s): Theorizing the Non-Western Web
Far too often in popular and academic contexts, the Western experience of the Web is taken to be the universal experience. While some of the largest web presences on the globe have their ideological and cultural roots in the United States, there are entire practices, technologies, and services that have never graced an American IP address. This panel isn’t so much about those practices, technologies, and services so much as it is a prerequisite effort at de-centering the West in the Web. As a whole, this panel thoroughly breaks down the deficit model of technological development: and instead shows the iterative, mutually-shaping relationships between nation-states, capital, culture, and networked technologies. David Peter Simon examines how Silicon Valley’s work “possibly subjugates the same people they aim to help” by way of applying a Gramscian analysis to his own work in Nairobi and Kampala. Jason Q. Ng not only reminds us that Wikipedia is not the primary reference site for the entire globe (perhaps not even a majority of it), but that the Western conception of what censorship looks like and how it acts should be similarly contextualized.
The invited presentations by Tolu Odumosu and Dalia Othman both offer glimpses into different social and technical (infra)structures that compose and influence each other and individual users. Odumosu’s focus on the development of Nigerian telecommunications infrastructure demonstrates the historical contingencies that make the Web many Americans are familiar with, and the primarily mobile phone-based web that has taken hold in Nigeria. By learning about the configuration of the Nigerian web, we come to understand just how easily the Western experience could have been radically different. Othman’s work in the Arab Spring is equally attuned to the particularities of geographies and local sociotechnical histories. By studying the ways in which activists use social media to organize and resist, Othman reveals networks’ social topography in a range of countries where civil societies’ relationships to their governments differ. more...
(Edit: 04/30/2014 Due to the strong response to this piece, I’ve written a formal response)
Consider this a PSA for the #TtW14 participants, for whom I have so much respect and admiration. Please, you smart and wonderful people, refrain from using “seminal” as a metaphor for foundational ideas.
Presider: Britney Summit-Gil (@beersandbooks)
Hashmod: Kate Miltner (@katemiltner)
This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Gone Viral: All Watched Over by Memes of Loving Grace.
There’s something categorically different about things that are a hit on the Web. Unlike a blockbuster movie or a critically-acclaimed TV show, a viral meme inculcates everyone in its production, popularity, and eventual descent into hackneyed trope-dom. Sometimes the “patient zero” of the meme is notorious or well-known, but often times there is no clear author. Such is the case in almost all of the case studies in this panel where memes are not so much treated as stories told by authors, but as tools and methods of political dissent, identity construction, and cultural critique. Patrick Sharbaugh’s presentation on civic engagement in Vietnam shows how viral memes afford new kinds of cultural protest that can come from very oblique angles, rather than head-on collisions with hegemony. Joel Penney surveys two seminal texts on virality and concludes that the intervening decades have proven these texts to be the basis of a “persuasion model of political internet use” but we have yet to see a systematic articulation of this persuasion model in action. Rob Horning turns the conversation inward by positing that “To the extent that the self is constituted in social media, it knows itself in terms of statistical measures of circulation and algorithmically generated feedback rather than other forms of content.”
Presider: David Paul Strohecker (@dpsFTW)
Hashmod: R. Stuart Geiger (@staeiou)
This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Consensual Hallucination: Wa$ted: The Making and Unmaking of Commodities
From the clean lines of an Apple product to the intangibility of the Internet, we are encouraged to think of the Web as something that doesn’t take up much room, let alone produce waste. At the heart of digital dualism is the false assumption that what happens on the internet, stays on the internet. The panelists in Wa$ted thoroughly debunk that notion by showing just how tangible the Web really is. Even if the work that happens online is largely intangible, it often organizes bodies and physical means of production. Wesley Shumar, Nora Madison, and Tyson Mitman’s work on craft beer communities demonstrate how networked individuals are enrolled in the production of goods that is both a part of and in contention with the neoliberal regime that created it. Heather Rosenfeld demonstrates a similar point by showing how energy smart devices and utility grids both feed into the neoliberal conception of the citizen-consumer but also point toward liberatory potentialities and environmental justice. Silicon Valley isn’t usually lumped together with energy and car companies as major polluters but, as Andrea Zeffiro and Mél Hogan’s work on techno-trash and Brian Thill’s work on digital wastelands show, the Internet makes a lot of trash. From spam folders to mercury-laden landfills, our status updates have deleterious effects on ourselves, others, and the environment. While Zeffiro and Hogan’s work underscores truly global nature of ewaste streams, Thill shows how deeply the problem of waste is misunderstood by those that create the most of it. more...
