Curating Media and Design

Papers from the Governing Algorithms conference is now online

The Governing Algorithms conference set out to explore the recent rise of algorithms as an object of interest in scholarship, policy, and practice beyond computer science.

Many interesting discussion papers have been submitted:

Governing Algorithms – A Provocation Piece
The Relevance of Algorithms
The Emperor’s New Codes: Reputation and Search Algorithms in the Finance Sector
Algorithms, Performativity and Governability
Bearing Accountable Witness to the Ethical Algorithm

All papers can be accessed here: http://governingalgorithms.org/resources/discussion-papers/

Aca-articles: Unlike Us – Understanding Social Media Monopolies

This issue of online open-access journal First Monday is dedicated to setting out a research platform that overcomes both the dominant quantitative analyses and the privacy paradigm in current social media research.

INTRO – The ubiquitous presence of social media in everyday life has not been met by equally pervasive research efforts for their critical understanding, due mostly to the increasing specialization and fragmentation of academic research. Unlike Us: Understanding Social Media Monopolies attempts to set out a research platform that overcomes both the dominant quantitative analyses and the privacy paradigm in current social media research.

Table of contents: http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/380/showToc

CFP: Digital Culture – Promises and Discomforts (due Apr 19)

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.

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: Digital imaginations and narratives , Digital Neighbourhoods and Citizenship, and Digital Engagement and Social Change.

Call for Papers for the DCC Workshop: Digital Culture – Promises and Discomforts. Department of Media Studies of the University of Bonn, Germany, Poppelsdorfer Allee 47, 53115, Bonn. October 2-5, 2013.

Extended abstracts due April 19, 2013.

Read full call: http://dccecrea.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/call-for-papers/

Book: Mediation and Protest Movements

Over the past year, international and national media have been full of stories about protest movements and tumultuous social upheaval from Tunisia to California. But scholars have not yet fully addressed the connection between these movements and the media and communication channels through which their messages spread.

Correcting that imbalance, Mediation and Protest Movements explores the nature of the relationship between protest movements, media representation, and communication strategies and tactics. By covering online and offline contexts, as well as mainstream and alternative media, Mediation and Protest Movements bridges the gap between social-movement theory and media and communication studies, making this an important text for students and scholars of the media and social change.

Editors: Bart Cammaerts, Alice Mattoni, and Patrick McCurdy

Publisher: Intellect, 2013

Conference: Governing Algorithms – computation, automation, and control

Algorithms are increasingly invoked as powerful entities that control, govern, sort, regulate, and shape everything from financial trades to news media. Nevertheless, the nature and implications of such orderings are far from clear. What exactly is it that algorithms “govern”? What is the role attributed to “algorithms” in these arguments? Can we turn the “problem of algorithms” into an object of productive inquiry?

This conference sets out to explore the recent rise of algorithms as an object of interest in scholarship, policy, and practice beyond computer science.

GOVERNING ALGORITHMS: A conference on computation, automation, and control. New York University, May 16-17, 2013.

Read more: http://governingalgorithms.org

Book: Producing the Internet – Critical Perspectives of Social Media

Should contemporary media culture be understood as a culture that offers unprecedented freedom for producing participators – so-called “produsers”, or should it rather be understood as a culture in which various forms of user participation in fact are conditioned, or even manufactured, by organized, professional producers?

The contributions to this book add to our critical understanding of these new forms of media. They all draw on various theoretical concepts – such as producers, community, and participation – used when analysing media culture. But they also share a critical interest in problematizing and analysing the forms of power built into this culture.

Editor: Tobias Olsson

Publisher: Nordicom, 2013

Selected chapter titles:

Social Media and Capitalism
Dirty Work. Why Journalists Shun Reader Comments
Transmedia Storytelling and a Young Audience. Public Service in the Blogosphere Era

Book: Spreadable Media – Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Spreadable Media, by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, maps fundamental changes taking place in our contemporary media environment, a space where corporations no longer tightly control media distribution and many of us are directly involved in the circulation of content.

The authors introduce the concept of “spreadability” to describe the ways content travels through social media.

If you don’t have the time to read the book you can listen to a discussion about it from SXSW Interactive 2013.

Authors: Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green

Publisher: NYU Press, 2013.

Book: Beyond WikiLeaks – Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism, and Society

Beyond WikiLeaks opens a space to reflect on the broader implications across political and media fields, and on the transformations that result from new forms of leak journalism and transparency activism.

A select group of renowned scholars, international experts, and WikiLeaks ‘insiders’ discuss the consequences of the WikiLeaks saga for traditional media, international journalism, freedom of expression, policymaking, civil society, social change, and international politics.

Edited by Benedetta Brevini, Arne Hintz and Patrick McCurdy

Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=637302

Authors include: Harvard University’s Yochai Benkler; Graham Murdoch of Loughborough University; net activism scholar, Gabriella Coleman; the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jillian York; and Guardian editor, Chris Elliott. The book also includes a conversation between philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and its prologue is written by Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Icelandic MP and editor of the WikiLeaks video ‘Collateral Murder’.

Book: Media interventions (essay collection)

This collection of essays, the first book-length treatment of its kind, explicates the concept of “media interventions” herein defined as activities and projects that secure, exercise, challenge or acquire media power for tactical and strategic action.

Edited by Kevin Howley w. afterword by Nick Couldry.

Published by Peter Lang, 2013.

MORE – Drawing on insights from media, communication and cultural studies, contributors offer penetrating analyses of media interventions in a variety of social, political, and cultural settings from culture jamming and DIY media, to public relations campaigns and reality television shows. In doing so, the volume develops an analytical framework for examining the complex and contradictory operation of media power in contemporary society.

Book: Digital Disconnect – How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“In Digital Disconnect, Robert McChesney offers a groundbreaking critique of the Internet, urging us to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.”

Author: Robert McChesney, professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and previous host of Media Matters.

Publisher: The New Press, 2013.

Full details: http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Disconnect-Capitalism-Internet-Democracy/dp/1595588671

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