In-between Space
10:45 a.m., Saturday, April 14, room 407
Faculty respondent: Christiane Paul (bio)
Social Network Economy: Immaterial Labor in Information Culture
Presenter: Brittany Paris (The New School)Bernard Stiegler in Technics in Time II--Disorientation argues that technology is memory. He explains that "through new technologies of representation, interpretation and inscription, time now consumes space and results in a disoriented human understanding of the world." The ubiquity of information output and quickening of information dynamics could arguably augment potential for social transformation, as information culture is inextricably bound both to what Tiziana Terranova calls the "physical processes of openness, emergence, capture and coding, combined with politics implying a dynamic involvement with information." In correlation to information culture, metrics of internet production and consumption are also attained and set to economic incentives that mold and generate activities specific to the medium. This paper explores the present state of an exceedingly information-based culture and the necessity to reform conceptions of political economy based on ephemeral work occurring in immaterial space of social networks.
Media Interventions: Mobility, Space and Resource
Presenter: Sindhu Zagoren (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)By looking at the nature of infrastructural systems, this paper offers an alternative explanation of what the object of mediation is, and why media institutions are so often privatized. Communication infrastructures are fundamentally shared systems. Whether physical hardware such as telegraph wires or “soft” infrastructures like language, they are our social connection and must function in common or not at all. Yet access to media infrastructure is almost always privatized.
When media infrastructures come into general use a three-fold process occurs. First, information and meanings are mobilized in new ways. This changes both the form of commodities and the meanings and uses associated with those commodities. Second, as infrastructure allows for the movement of things (commodities) and practices (meanings), it rearticulates and manufactures specific formations of time and space – i.e., the way space and time are generally regarded is changed. Standardized time zones, airspace, and cyberspace are all examples of the impact technological mobilization has had on space and time. The third part of this process is that this rearticulated formation of space/time becomes a site of struggle – a resource to be fought over. It is in these struggles over shared resource that dominant modes of power are enacted and reproduced. Understanding how media come to be thought of as resources gives us a clearer window into the working of media policy and can allow for alternative kinds of intervention.
The Digital Data Arms Race: Google, Facebook, and Martin Heidegger?
Presenter: Andrew Iliadis (Purdue University)“The digital data arms race” is a quote from Jeffrey Chester of the Centre for Digital Democracy. The term refers to information mining; the lugubrious, subterranean pilfering acts of the owners of our digital-social superstructures. Facebook’s antics have been well-documented and recently Google has re-entered the fray. The Economist reported that on January 24th Google announced “a number of changes to its privacy policy.” The change they are referring to will essentially give Google power to use digital data “generated by users signed in to one of its services in other areas of its business too.” What this might mean is that our user-generated content can potentially become veritable fodder for the growing numbers of seemingly munificent on-line ad-barons. What this really means in terms of our on-line privacy and identity is that, in the digital data arms race, everything we do will become something of an advertising databank, not least in terms of the network-feedback generated and directed from one user to another. Enter the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology contains some of the difficult thinker’s most obscure and impenetrable concepts yet it remains one of his most profound ruminations on technology. Without oversimplifying, the crux lies in his conceptualization of the potential threats inherent to treating man as a “standing-reserve.” Can our online identities be thought of in the same way, and is the digital data arms race not a modernized standing-reserve? The paper will unpack this concept in light of current developments.