Category: observations

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CFP> “VIRAL/GLOBAL Popular Culture and Social Media: An International Perspective” 13th Sept 17 CAMRI

Via Tony Sampson.

“VIRAL/GLOBAL Popular Culture and Social Media: An International Perspective” The University of Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), Sept 13th 2017

Date:
13 September 2017
Time: 9:00am to 7:00pm
Location: 309 Regent Street Regent Campus, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW – View map

Gone-Viral-event-main-photo

Conference organised by the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI)

Keynote Panel

  • Nancy Baym 
  • Emily Keightley
  • Dave Morley (TBC)
  • Tony D Sampson
  • Paddy Scannell

This interdisciplinary conference aims to examine how and why everyday popular culture is produced and consumed on digital platforms. There is increasing interest in studying and discussing the linkages between popular cultural and social media, yet there exist important gaps when comparing such cultural phenomena and modes of consumption in a global, non-west-centric context. The conference addresses a significant gap in theoretical and empirical work on social media by focusing on the politics of digital cultures from below and in the context of everyday life. To use Raymond Williams’s phrase, we seek to rethink digital viral cultures as ‘a whole way of life’; how ‘ordinary’, everyday digital acts can amount to forms of ‘politicity’ that can redefine experience and what is possible.

The conference will examine how social media users engage with cultural products in digital platforms. We will also be assessing how the relationship between social media and popular cultural phenomena generate different meanings and experiences.

The conference engages with the following key questions:

  • How do online users in different global contexts engage with viral/popular cultures?
  • How can the comparative analysis of different global contexts help us contribute to theorising emergent viral cultures in the age of social media?
  • How do viral digital cultures redefine our experience of self and the world?

We welcome papers from scholars that will engage critically with particular aspects of online popular cultures. Themes may include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Analysing viral media texts: method and theory
  • Theorising virality: new/old concepts
  • Rethinking popular culture in the age of social media
  • Social media, politicity and the viral
  • The political economy of viral cultures
  • Memes, appropriation, collage, virality and trash aesthetics
  • Making/doing/being/consuming viral texts
  • Hybrid strategies of anti-politics in digital media
  • Viral news/Fake news
  • Non-mainstream music, protest, and political discussion
  • Capitalism and viral marketing

PROGRAMME AND REGISTRATION

This one-day conference, taking place on Wednesday, 13th of September 2017, will consist of a keynote panel and panel sessions. The fee for registration for all participants, including presenters, will be £40, with a concessionary rate of £15 for students, to cover all conference documentation, refreshments and administration costs.

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS

The deadline for abstracts is Monday 10 July 2017. Successful applicants will be notified by Monday 17 July of 2017. Abstracts should be 250 words. They must include the presenter’s name, affiliation, email and postal address, together with the title of the paper and a 150-word biographical note on the presenter. Please send all these items together in a single Word file, not as pdf, and entitle the file and message with ‘CAMRI 2017’ followed by your surname. The file should be sent by email to Events Coordinator Karen Foster at har-events@westminster.ac.uk

Original: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/call-for-papers-viral-global-popular-cultures-and-social-media-an-international-perspective

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“The ideology of friendship” – new paper by Prof. Daniel Miller

This looks interesting – a paper building on the excellent Why We Post project… probably a good one for digital cultural geographers.

Here’s the title and abstract:

The ideology of friendship in the Facebook era

This article suggests that while anthropologists have developed a highly nuanced analysis of kinship and friendship under a more general comparative study of relationality, this emphasis upon practice needs to be complemented by an alternative focus on the use of these terms as ideology, where we find a more simplistic and dualistic usage. The rise of new social media and the verb friending highlights a more general shift from the idea of fictive kinship to that of fictive friendship, where it is the ideals represented by the supposed voluntarism and authenticity of friendship that has now come to dominate the way people view kin relations. Evidence is provided from ethnographies in the Philippines, Trinidad, and England that illustrate the prevalence of a practice where kin relations reposition themselves under the idiom of friendship with both negative and positive consequences. This incorporation of kinship within friendship can also bring back a sense of rule and obligation, which has led to a decline in the use of Facebook by the young.

Also, the paper quotes, in the introduction, a great scene from South Park that I use in teaching 🙂 See above.

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How and why is children’s digital data being harvested?

A large number of CCTV cameras

Nice post by Huw Davies, which is worth a quick read (its fairly short)…

We need to ask what would data capture and management look like if it is guided by a children’s framework such as this one developed here by Sonia Livingstone and endorsed by the Children’s Commissioner here. Perhaps only companies that complied with strong security and anonymisation procedures would be licenced to trade in UK? Given the financial drivers at work, an ideal solution would possibly make better regulation a commerical incentive. We will be exploring these and other similar questions that emerge over the coming months.

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A tendency to spill…

Talented and creative friends I used to knock about with in the studio have made a lovely thing for the International Literature Showcase that you should definitely check out. Please see A Tendency to Spill, an interactive story created by the superlative duo Hazel Grian and Constance Fleuriot.

A Tendency To Spill is an interactive Science Fiction story that involves a chat bot (instant chat using artificial intelligence.)

Romy is a human child brought up in world of robots. She is about to be taken from her home and expelled to the human world across The Wall. She doesn’t have much time, maybe 10 or 20 minutes. She asks you now for a crash course in what’s really at the heart of human society.

This story is recommended for anyone aged 13 and upwards and is equivalent to Young Adult Fiction. With that in mind, appropriate behaviour and language are expected from you as well as from Romy.

We’d love you to take part in our research, please help us by filling in the form when prompted. It doesn’t mean we’re watching you while you chat but interactions are archived and, if you agree, we may share them in future whilst you remain entirely anonymous.

Thank you and enjoy the short story.

Click here to meet Romy.

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Through a data broker darkly…

Here’s an exercise to do, as a non-specialist, for yourself or maybe as part of a classroom activity: discuss what Facebook (data brokers, credit checkers etc etc.) might know about me/us/you, how accurate the data/information might be, and what that means to our lives.

One of the persistent themes of how we tell stories about the ‘information society’, ‘big data’, corporate surveillance and so on is the extent of the data held about each and every one of us. Lots of stories are told on the back of that and there are, of course, real life consequences to inaccuracies.

Nevertheless, an interesting way of starting the exercise above is to compare and contrast the following two articles:

Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life:

The exploitation of personal information has become a multi-billion industry. Yet only the tip of the iceberg of today’s pervasive digital tracking is visible; much of it occurs in the background and remains opaque to most of us.

I Bought a Report on Everything That’s Known About Me Online:

If you like percentages, nearly 50 percent of the data in the report about me was incorrect. Even the zip code listed does not match that of my permanent address in the U.S.; it shows instead the zip code of an apartment where I lived several years ago. Many data points were so out of date as to be useless for marketing–or nefarious–purposes: My occupation is listed as “student”; my net worth does not take into account my really rather impressive student loan debt. And the information that is accurate, including my age and aforementioned net worth (when adjusted for the student debt), is presented in wide ranges.

Of course, it does not matter if the data is correct – those inaccuracies have real-world consequences, and the granularity of the accuracy only matters in certain circumstances. So, thinking about how and why the data captured about us matters, what it might facilitate – allow or prevent us or those around us doing seems like an interesting activity to occupy thirty minutes or so…

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The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto

Via dmf. Definitely worth watching >>


“This dream of utopia can encourage us to forget that outer space will not save us from injustice and that cyberspace was prefigured upon a “master/slave” relationship.

While we are often Othered, we are not aliens.

Though our ancestors were mutilated, we are not mutants.

Post-black is a misnomer.

Post-colonialism is too.

The most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet.”

The rest is here: http://martinesyms.com/the-mundane-afrofuturist-manifesto/

See also: http://blackradicalimagination.com

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Responsibility gaps and autonomy – AI, autonomous weapons and cars

Kitt the 'intelligent' car from the TV show Knight Rider

Over on the excellent Algocracy blog/podcast John Danaher interviews Hin-Yan Liu, a law scholar in Copenhagen who’s done some work on responsibility and autonomy in relation to autonomous weapons systems and driverless cars. The discussion is really interesting, thinking through various ways on understanding responsibility in relation to autonomy, expanding out ideas about what an ‘autonomous weapons system’ might be (such as – is a private military contractor an AWS?) and thinking through the ethical, moral and political issues of different ways responsibility gets understood. I encourage you to have a listen.

This stems from work by Liu that is published in two papers:

Here’s Liu’s faculty webpage.

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Excellent postgrad opportunities with Data Justice Lab

From: Data Justice Lab

Funding is currently available for students in postgraduate programmes at Cardiff University, including the MA Digital Media and Society and the PhD in Journalism (with a focus on Digital Media and Society). Applications for the coming academic year (2017/18) are still accepted. Students are welcome to work on issues of data justice and become part of the Lab.

The MA Digital Media and Society explores current challenges in areas such as big data, digital rights, social media, digital culture and economy, internet governance and online politics. The Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies also offers a wide range of other MA programmes in areas such as journalism studies, data journalism, and political communication.

Cardiff University offers Master’s Excellence Scholarships in the form of a tuition fee discount. To be eligible for the scholarships, please apply for the MA programme no later than 15 June.

The School’s PhD programme encourages students to engage with one of its research clusters, including Digital Media and Society. Applications that are submitted by Friday 2nd June will be considered for an ESRC studentship programme that addresses research challenges in areas such as digital infrastructure and the use of data.

Cardiff’s School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC) is one of the world’s leading departments in Media & Communications. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework the school was ranked 2nd in the UK for the quality of its journalism, media and communications research.