--PLEASE PASS ON TO INTERESTED PARTIES-- Hello, friends in London! I wanted to invite folks to join me next Tuesday at the University of East London Public Lecture Series, where I am giving a talk about--among other thing-- half-naked young girls on the internet. Because it's the sort of conversation that's best had in the presence of people under the age of 45, I hope students especially come for the lecture and join in the dialogue afterwards. (I could probably also visit a class or two briefly to talk, if that¹s of interest to anyone; this is a topic I never seem to lose interest in...) Here are some details about the lecture: PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES TITLE: ³From Personal Property to Speaking Subjects: Youth, Gender, and the Right to Credit in an Attention Economy.² SPEAKER: Dr. Theresa Senft, Senior Lecturer, Media Studies, UEL Date: Tuesday 9 March 2010 Time: 17:30 Venue: West Building G.02 (next to Oscars) University of East London, Docklands Campus Transport: Cyprus DLR Here is a quick summary: ³From Personal Property to Speaking Subjects: Youth, Gender, and the Right to Credit in an Attention Economy.² This talk engages with the politics of female sexual self-display over the Internet, especially focusing on teens in America and the U.K. I begin by discussing a recent U.S. law suit filed by two Indiana teens against their high school principal after he punished them for posting risqué photos in a private section of their MySpace accounts. Echoing current wisdom that there is never a guarantee of privacy on the Internet, the American Civil Liberties Union (representing the girls) has chosen to frame their activities as free-speech acts, arguing that these teens were expressing themselves to themselves in two sorts of bedrooms: their real-life one, and their online one. In this talk, I frame the case in terms of my recent work on a phenomenon I call ³micro-celebrity²: a new way to perform the self that combines the visual techniques of corporate branding with the distribution technologies of the Internet. I am particularly interested in how sexism and ageism converge within micro-celebrity¹s overwhelming investment in the so-called attention economies of the Web.¹ This speech returns to a question I raised in my book Camgirls: ³Why are women continually encouraged to express themselves in media through confession, celebrity and sexual display, yet punished with conservative censure and backlash when their representation becomes too much¹ to handle?² Dr. Theresa Senft is interested in how the Internet has been changing our notions of the public, the private and the pornographic in contemporary society. For her most recent book, Camgirls: Celebrity & Community in the Age of Social Networks, Terri ran a webcam out of her own home for a year and charted her experiences. Other books by Terri include History of the Internet, 1843-Present (co-author) and a special issue of Women & Performance devoted to sexuality & cyberspace (co-editor.) Terri's work has been published in The New York Times, she has appeared on National Public Radio (U.S.), and in the documentary Webcam Girls. ---------------- Note: this lecture will be an updated and revised-for-the-UK version of something I did earlier at Harvard last year. It will also tangentially addresses teen ³sexting,² a practice that is providing the foundation for a moral panic in the U.S. right now. The URL for that talk (if you want to read, or assign to students, or whatever), is: http://tsenft.livejournal.com/405387.html#cutid1 Feel free to contact me with any questions about the lecture, thoughts on the topic, or (especially) links to other work being done in this area, by you or anyone else you know. I'm at t.senft@uel.ac.uk Many thanks! -- Dr. Theresa M. Senft Programme Leader & Senior Lecturer, Media Studies School of Humanities & Social Sciences University of East London Docklands Campus 4-6 University Way London E162RD phone: 020 8223 4255 www.terrisenft.net www.livejournal.com/users/tsenft