conference

The annual meetings of the American Sociological Association were held this past week in Las Vegas. More than 5,000 sociologists converged from departments around the world to meet face-to-face in a massive conference hotel. Planning such an event is a massive undertaking with a vast array of logistical issues; yet, one facet of the meeting, Wi-Fi access (or, rather, its inadequacy), sparked a major debate.

First, we should mention that as conference organizers who have run up against the limits of a venue’s Wi-Fi infrastructure, we understand the difficulties in getting people reliably connected. During last Spring’s Theorizing the Web conference, the Wi-Fi crashed under such heavy pressure. However, we were working with a classroom building on a campus, not a massive conference hotel that already has Wi-Fi access built in. It is now the norm for major conference venues to have Wi-Fi available at a price. While the relatively small Theorizing the Web conference might not have a budget for universal Wi-Fi access, ASA could easily spread the cost over the massive number of those paying for registration (or even make a separate Wi-Fi registration fee). more...

The 2011 American Sociological Association Meetings are about to start this week in Las Vegas, Nevada.

As the conference gets underway, the volume of tweets containing the #ASA2011 hashtag is rising.

Using NodeXL, I collected a set of tweets with the #ASA2011 tag and mapped the connections among the people who tweeted that term.

These are the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word ASA2011 when queried on August 15, 2011 more...

I want to reflect on Theorizing the Web 2011 by asking for a discussion about what academic conferences should look like. In fact, let’s forget the term “conference” for a moment and ask how thinkers should best organize to discuss intellectual work in public?

Theorizing the Web 2011 was PJ Rey and I’s first attempt at tackling this question [read PJ’s review of the event here]. We started this blog to provide a public forum for ideas and the conference was intended to do the same. Many reviews of the event have emerged (some posted on this blog over the past ten days). What has surprised me most is the degree to which the conference itself has been a main topic of discussion. And while we are very proud that the reviews have been so overwhelmingly positive about our view of an academic event, we understand that this is also a result of the failing of traditional venues for the intellectual exchange of ideas. Academic conferences are too often suffered through and individual sessions often poorly attended. Media outlets tend to ignore anything that smells too much like intellectualism, a term itself that has come to be viewed pejoratively because, at least in part, intellectuals have so poorly communicated ideas to the public. As graduate students, we know we needed to create a world that is better prepared to communicate the critical theories so important to understand our changing realities.

And the result on April 9^th went well above our expectations.

We attempted to bring in art, multi-media, interdisciplinarity, and even non-disciplinarity to this event. Registration was pay-what-you-want. The event began with beers in an alley and finished with a loud band. We tried lots of things and will try much more if we do this again next year [we want to].The art was fun, and us organizers can take credit for that. more...

As many of you already know, the Cyborgology editors decided to throw a conference called Theorizing the Web. The conference will be in College Park, MD (just outside of Washington, D.C.) on April 9th. Today we are excited to announce the program for the conference and attach a flier that we hope you all can distribute to those who you think might be interested.

As you will see, the response was terrific. We built 14 panels out of the 56 papers we accepted (from the over 100 submissions). There will be three invited panels (on feminist activism, race, and methods). There will be two symposia (one on the role of social media in the Arab uprisings and another on social media and street art). There will be two plenaries (one by Saskia Sassen and another by George Ritzer). And we are excited to have danah boyd deliver our keynote.

If that was not enough, we have plenty of art-related surprises in store for those who attend. We have invited artists of all types to display and perform art specifically tailored to the themes of the conference. This will be one busy carnivalesque day for those who love technology and/or theory!

The program is found here: http://www.cyborgology.org/theorizingtheweb/program.html

Last, a flier for the conference [.pdf here]. Please distribute widely!

TtW2011 Flyer

The abstract submission deadline for the Cyborgology “Theorizing the Web 2011” conference had been extended to February 20th.  Submit here.  Registration also now open.