Digital/Social Media and Memory: A Symposium
Follow tweets from this event Wednesday: #memorystudieslive University of Glasgow, Wednesday 17th April 2013, 9am-5.50pm BST Does promiscuous media make for promiscuous memory? Even the sciences-of-the-mind increasingly search for cognition – the mental process of awareness, perception, remembering – outside of the head, extended and distributed across digital/social worlds. Memory is breaking out of the archive, the organization, the institution, increasingly diffused across brains, bodies, and personal and public lives. Has the digital leached away scarcity, trust, obligation, and much of memory’s former faithful companions? ‘Memory’ today seems different, strange, but which has also acquired (paradoxically) new force and new uncertainties. Is connectivity irresistible? Is memory lost to the machine? Is the archive broken? Six leading experts in the fields of media archaeology, media studies and memory studies assess the emergent forces of remembering and forgetting in the new media ecology: Wolfgang Ernst, Humboldt University, Berlin. Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art Wulf Kansteiner, SUNY, Binghamton José van Dijck, University of Amsterdam Anna Reading, King's College London William Merrin, Swansea University Glasgow Memory Group: http://bit.ly/YEaXTB Speaker abstracts here: http://bit.ly/149ojLa __________________________________________________ Professor Andrew Hoskins Interdisciplinary Research Professor http://www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/socialsciences/ourstaff/andrewhoskins/ Founding Editor-in-Chief, Memory Studies (http://mss.sagepub.com) Director, Adam Smith Research Foundation College of Social Sciences University of Glasgow 66 Oakfield Avenue Glasgow G12 8LS T: +44 (0)141 330 7656 F: +44 (0)141 330 7491 W: www.glasgow.ac.uk<http://www.glasgow.ac.uk/> The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401
Call for Papers (Special Issue) - Deadline: 15.05.2013 Transformation of Citizenship and Governance - Asia Focus: The Challenges of Social and Mobile Media Guest Editors: Marko M. Skoric (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Nojin Kwak (University of Michigan, USA), Ines Mergel (Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University), and Peter Parycek (Danube University Krems, Austria) The proliferation of social media and mobile phones over the last decade has spurred significant interest in their civic and political implications not only within the scholarly community, but also among journalists, practitioners, activists, policy-makers, and ordinary citizens. While the role of new media platforms in facilitating macro-level political changes has generally attracted most attention, these new communication tools are also actively utilized in more traditional civic and political processes, including community initiatives and electoral campaigns. Also important is people’s everyday use of new technologies, which research has uncovered as providing an opportunity to encounter public affairs news and discourse, enhance understanding of issues, and get involved in civic and political activities. Further to this, social and mobile media platforms have created new channels and means for citizens to interact with governments and other political institutions, monitor their functioning, and more actively participate in policy-making processes. There is little doubt that the emerging social and mobile media practices, including content generation, collaboration, and network organization, are changing our understanding of governance and politics. While the above changes are already widely debated in mature, developed Western democracies, there is an even greater need to address them in the context of rapidly developing Asian societies. Although countries in Asia vary greatly in terms of the levels of economic and political development, quality of information and communication infrastructure, as well as their cultural, political and religious traditions, the arrival of networked new media platforms has lead to some similar socio-political shifts. Those include an increasing diversity of voices in the public sphere, greater visibility of political discourse, increased demands for transparency and accountability, and a significantly improved capacity for decentralized civic and political action. This special issue is aimed at showcasing innovative scholarly works examining various subjects concerning the role of social media, mobile phones, and other new technologies in the formation of democratic citizenship and good governance in Asia. We seek studies that address relevant topics in a particular Asian country, and also welcome comparative research on Asian countries or Asian and non-Asian countries. A special section in the journal will cover those Asian cases, while we also encourage to submit authors covering the issues topic with a non-Asian focus to submit their work for a second section. The authors are encouraged to explore diverse topics, and possible areas include (but are not limited to): Use of social media, mobile phones, and other new communication technologies in electionsUse of social and mobile media by civic and grassroots groupsInfluence of new media on citizen choices, participation, and knowledgePatterns of new media use and civic and political consequencesSocial media to engage citizens; smart & mobile democracy Political elites’ use of social and mobile mediaSustainability of e-participation Networks vs. traditional party-structures ICTs and their use for governmental transformationOpen data initiatives Transparency, participation and collaboration in government Crowdsourcing for governanceService delivery via new communication channels Submission Guidelines Articles submitted for consideration must be written in English. Length of paper: 7,500-12,000 words, inclu Please download the template and relevant guidelines at http://www.jedem.org/about/submissions#authorGuidelines Important Dates Submission deadline: 15.5.2013 Deadline for peer review: 15.6.2013 Editorial decision: 30.6.2013 For more information please see www.jedem.org or contact judith.schossboeck@donau-uni.ac.at ------------------------------------------------------- Blog: Digital Government and Society ------------------------------------------------------- CeDEM - Conference for eDemocracy ------------------------------------------------------- Mag. Judith Schoßböck Zentrum für E-Governance Donau-Universität Krems Dr.-Karl-Dorrek-Straße 30 A-3500 Krems +43 2732 893 2309 judith.schossboeck@donau-uni.ac.at ------------------------------------------------------- JeDEM - Journal for eDemocracy and Open Government -------------------------------------------------------
ECREA Digital Culture and Communication Call for Papers – Digital Culture: Promises and Discomforts EXTENDED DEADLINE: May, 15 The ongoing mediatisation process is subject to social transformations as well as technical innovation processes and creative practices. We endorse digital technologies with the promises of a better way of life, solving our problems of managing the world’s complexity, allowing better participatory policies and helping us in our daily life. At the same time, however, we are confronted with the fundamental problems of technological structures, such as the problems of Internet surveillance, control and the unequal distribution of power on the Web. Looking at digital cultures as a driving force of social change, we find ourselves confronted with a variety of contradictory images of digital culture and its possible futures. In this workshop we want to critically discuss the promises and discomforts of digital culture taking into account the tensions raised by different material practices, understandings and social orders around the role of digital media in performing social change. Special focus lies on the three aspects of Digital Culture: (1) Digital imaginations and narratives The images of future are drawn in tecno-scapes, like in science-fiction films, artificial intelligence designs, virtual worlds or metaverses. What kinds of individuals, societies and environments are imagined through the growing pervasiveness of Digital Culture into our lives? How digital imaginaries shape our experience and relate to our ways of narrating ourselves and our creative practices? What are the role of innovation, creative industries and urbanlabs in the design of the future and in the different kinds of social intervention? How digital imagination is performing new narrative forms as well as transforming knowledge production and sharing? (2) Digital Neighbourhoods and Citizenship Among the existing networked digital technologies it is smartphones and tablet computers, which are becoming increasingly popular at an extraordinary pace. These devices not only make digital media applications truly ubiquitous but also create an abundance of digital location-sensitive information, which saturates local places, social relations, and the perception and organisation of neighbourhoods. The concept of space turns into a mash-up of material and digital places, creating new forms of the social while at the same time renegotiating the cultural and political logics of local/global or private/public. How does the use of digital media trigger new social phenomena, such as altered forms and modes of communication, collaboration, consumption, infrastructure, mobility or public service? (3) Digital Engagement and Social Change Digital engagement manifests itself in a broad range of digital practices. People discursively engage through and with digital media and thus dissolve spatial, temporal and social boundaries. Especially a few popular commercial social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, are presumed to play a crucial role in the process of social change by means of interaction and connectivity. On a political dimension, citizens and activists voice their opinions, discuss political issues, organize and mobilize for protest in new or alternative public spheres. However, it remains unclear, whether and in which differentiations digital media engagement affects established power relations and thus promotes social change. Which diverse forms of political engagement unfold in digital media environments? How can underlying technological and power structures of media be rendered visible and to what extent do they affect the possibilities and boundaries of digital engagement? We welcome papers picking up any of the described issues and topics and we will also consider contributions related with digital forms of social intervention, art projects or urbanlabs proposals. Extended abstracts should be no longer than 700 words, written in English and contain a clear outline of the argument, the theoretical framework, methodology and results (if applicable). Participants may submit more than one proposal, but only one paper by the same first author might be accepted. Panel and paper proposals from PhD students and early career scholars are particularly welcome. All proposals should be submitted by May 15, 2013 to ecreadigitalculture@gmail.com. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out after June 30, 2013. Keynote Speakers We are delighted to announce the following two keynote speakers: Annette Markham (Umeå University, Sweden) – topic to be announced Jakob Svensson (Karlstad University, Sweden) will give a lecture on “New Media for Development” The workshop will take place at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Bonn, Germany Poppelsdorfer Allee 47, 53115, Bonn. The conference date is October 2nd – 5th, 2013. find more information on: dccecrea2013.uni-bonn.de http://dccecrea.wordpress.com
participants (3)
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Andrew Hoskins -
Jessica Einspänner -
Judith Schossboeck