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Lisa Lipscomb is a Sociology PhD student at The New School for Social Research in New York City. She holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School and a BA in English Literature from Western Illinois University. Her general interests include media, visual culture, gender and sexuality, and critical theory. Prior to returning to graduate school, Lipscomb worked in magazine publishing and film/video post-production.
Digital Events: Media Rituals in the Electronic Age
This essay looks at how a single event, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan on the streets of Tehran, Iran during post-election protests, became visible in the United States by way of digital media. The role of digital media will be scrutinized, as the event was captured using, most likely, a cellphone and distributed on the Internet through Facebook and YouTube. This essay clarifies how an event that unfolded on the streets of Iran came to be known across the world and how the United States came to a “definition of the situation” informed by and through digital media. An analysis of the American reaction/response to the “Neda death video” shows that a new type of event is taking place in the public sphere, and subsequently ritualized in the digital sphere.
Nicholas Bongiorno attended NYU Film School and worked in broadcast journalism. He later received his BA in Cinema from Binghamton University where he studied with filmmakers such as Ken Jacobs and Ariana Gerstein. His writing, research and film-work deal specifically with the ways in which capital structures consciousness vis a vis media and the ways in which media and consciousness act as sites of contestation. His documentary work-in-progress, Juggernaut, has received a Mcnair Scholars Grant and a Binghamton University Creative Grant.
MySpace Contra Multitudes: An Analysis of Social Networking Sites as a Function of Control Society
A critique and analysis of “social networking websites” such as MySpace and Facebook as an example of contemporary modes of structuring “identities of control” as a function of post-Fordist flexible accumulation. The paper provides a history of the spatio-temporal and semiotic means by which successive media technologies have structured the subject in relation to prevalent forms of capital accumulation and touches upon ways in which these technologies had become perennial sites of contestation. The paper will explore the dynamics of several ongoing emerging initiatives in new media culture including tactical media, organized networks and the utilization of web technologies as control-contestant strategies informed by Hardt and Negri’s conception of the “biopolitical multitude”.