Hello list, this is just a reminder..... with 2 colleagues I am running a track at forthcoming Italian STS conference "EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, SOCIAL WORLDS" this June 21-23, 2012, in Rovigo. The CfP of our track might be of interest for some people in this list. Feel free to submit an abstract. :-) Abstracts (in Italian or English) should be sent as email attachment (as MS word or Rich Text Format) to the track’s coordinators (and carbon copied to 4convegnosts@gmail.com) by March 1, 2012. Abstracts with a maximum length of 500 words should contain the title, author's name, affiliation and contact details including e-mail. Further information on the conference on: www.stsitalia.org TRACK: INTERNET AND NEW PRODUCTIVE PARADIGMS: THE STS CONTRIBUTION Convernors: Stefano De Paoli (Fondazione <ahref, Trento, stefano@ahref.eu) Cristiano Storni (University of Limerick, cristiano.storni@ul.ie) Maurizio Teli (Fondazione <ahref, Trento, maurizio@ahref.eu) The exponential diffusion of the Internet on a global scale shows the emergence of new and socio-technical arrangements that seem to call into question our traditional separation between production and consumption. For many, we are witnessing the emergence and consolidation of a completely new production paradigm where production processes are decentralised, distributed among an undisclosed mass of actors often proactive, sometimes without a predictable path. The examples of this grow daily: Wikipedia, free and open source software and hardware, folksonomies, crowdsourcing platforms, online hacktivism, Do-it-Yourself communities, and so on. New concepts have been developed in an attempt to capture these new practices and these new socio-technical arrangements: in the late 1970s, Toffler (1980) theorized the emergence of the prosumer, both producer and consumer of goods. This phenomenon of convergence between the producer and consumer has stimulated research to generate new concepts such as "wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006)," commons-based peer production "(Benkler, 2006)," produsage "(Bruns, 2008), and ideas like the Hack-tivism (Auty, 2004) or Mash-ups technology (Hartmann et al. 2006). At the same time, however, we are witnessing the emergence of criticisms that highlight that these innovative aspects are the perpetuation, more or less obvious, of the traditional capitalist logic. This seems to fuel disputes around the themese of control, surveillance, exploitation of intellectual property management, deskilling, etc. (Lash, 2002, Terranova, 2000, De Paoli and Storni, 2011) Instead of taking the emergence of the new production paradigm as a matter of fact, the goal of this track is to describe and understand the practices and dynamics that characterize the sociotechnical collectives behind the phenomena mentioned above, and discuss how they help us to rethink not only the traditional division of labour between production and consumption, but mostly what we mean with the terms work, production, consumption, and property (commons) in our information society. In this sense to invite contributions and case studies in different areas to discuss, but are not limited to: - the role of STS in the study of new emerging practices in the information society; - how to rethink and/or deconstruct empirically the concepts of production, consumption, property, work and good: debates, controversies and new definitions; - doing and undoing the boundaries between production and consumption (or design and use); - new conceptions of labor and its distribution; - Do-it-Yourself and Do-it-with-Others: new practices? References Auty, C., 2004, “Political Hacktivism: tool of the underdog or scourge of cyberspace?” in Aslib proc: new information perspectives, Vol. 56, No. 4, pp. 212-22 Benkler, Y, 2006, The wealth of Networks: how social production transform markets and freedom. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bruns, A., 2008, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From production to produsage. New York: Peter Lang. De Paoli S. and Storni C, 2011, “Produsage in hybrid networks: sociotechnical skills in the case of Arduino”. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 17(1), 31-52. Hartmann, B. et al., 2006, Hacking, Mashing, Gluing: A Study of Opportunistic Design and Development, Technical Report, Stanford University Computer Science Department. Lash, Scott. 2002. Critique of Information. London: Sage Tapscott, D. and Williams, A. 2006, Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything. New York: Portfolio. Toffler, A., 1980, The Third Wave. New York: Morrow.