[CITASA] “THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY”
FYI
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Trebor Scholz" scholzt@newschool.edu
Date: October 8, 2009 6:57:27 PM EDT
To: "<Laura Forlano" lef45@columbia.edu
Subject: Please distribute on your list etc?
NEWS RELEASE
Media Contacts:
Bridget Fisher, 212.229.5667 x3094; fisherb@newschool.edu
Sandra Ordonez, 212.229.5667 x3994; sandratordonez@hotmail.com
EUGENE LANG COLLEGE PRESENTS:
“THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY”
A CONFERENCE ON THE CHANGING FACE OF LABOR IN THE DIGITAL AGE
First-of-its-Kind Conference Examines How Social Media is Transforming
the Economy, Labor and Society
November 12—14, The New School, New York
New York, October 12, 2009—On November 12 to 14, Eugene Lang College
The
New School for Liberal Arts will host an international conference,
"The
Internet as Playground and Factory," which will explore the meaning
and
changing face of labor in the digital era. For three days, 90
theorists,
artists, legal scholars, activists, students, programmers, historians,
and social media experts will join to re-evaluate what constitutes
unpaid labor, value, leisure, play, fun, and exploitation in an
economy
that is increasingly driven by the expropriation of all our blogging,
data entries in online profiles, and submitted photos and videos. This
event will commence a biennial series of conferences titled, “The
Politics of Digital Media.”
"Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are changing the way citizens
can speak truth to power,” said Neil Gordon, dean of Eugene Lang
College
The New School for Liberal Arts. “Social networking services and
mobile
phone technologies allow activists and the millions of people who
generate financial value online to re-think unionization, resistance,
and even ways of making a living. Eugene Lang College is proud to
begin
an ambitious series of biennial conferences on digital media with an
event drawing attention to labor, an issue that affects us all. With a
focus on interdisciplinary education and an emphasis on civic
engagement, Lang is the perfect platform to analyze social media and
emerging forms of labor from the perspectives of the social sciences,
arts, and Internet studies.”
The conference will be comprised of discussions, panels,
presentations, a film screening, a playroom, a conference game, and a
re-enactment of Facebook by a performance artist. The event seeks to
advance the conversation about digital media beyond technological
advances and commercial applications to touch upon vital issues facing
the future of Internet users. Topics include motivations for social
participation, exploitation of online play, data-lock, access across
race and class, the precariousness of working conditions and
unionization, political consciousness, and the social costs of
government and corporate surveillance. Beyond critical analysis, the
conference will seek to offer potential responses to the commercial
culture of the global network of networks. It will address the dangers
of yielding our pleasure, data, and friends to profit-oriented,
mainstream platforms and discuss current alternatives and possible
near-future scenarios.
"This conference alerts us to the fact that hundreds of millions
of people continuously make the totality of their life energy
available
to a handful of enterprises,” said Trebor Scholz, conference convener
and assistant professor of Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang
College. “ The speakers will join to propose different visions in
which
individuals and groups can be change agents in the building of
alternatives. By approaching this subject through a series of
collaborative follow-up events, we hope to support and continue the
critical analysis of this ever-evolving social phenomena.”
Internationally visible authors, activists, and artists
including Mark Andrejevic, Michel Bauwens, Jonathan Beller, Patricia
Ticineto Clough, Gabriella Coleman, Sean Cubitt, Jodi Dean, Ursula
Endlicher, Alexander Galloway, Pat Kane, M. Christopher Kelty, Nick
Montfort, Lisa Nakamura, Christiane Paul, Howard Rheingold, Douglas
Rushkoff, Fred Turner, McKenzie Wark, and Jonathan L. Zittrain will
address issues of digital labor from various disciplinary standpoints.
The conference will take place at The New School campus in
Greenwich Village. On Thursday, November 12, the conference will begin
with a film screening of Sleep Dealers, a widely celebrated science
fiction film about virtual labor, followed by a discussion with the
director, Alex Rivera. The screening will begin at 5:00 p.m. in Room
404
of 66 W. 12th Street and be followed by a reception at the Eugene Lang
Café at 7:30pm. On Friday, November 13, at 10:00 a.m., New School
President Bob Kerrey will open the conference, which will run events
in
three parallel tracks. At 6:00 p.m. on Friday, performance artist
Ursula
Endlicher and Burak Arikan will perform “Facebook Re-enactments,” a
piece about networked structures, identities, and online behavior. On
Saturday at 10:00 a.m. at 66 Fifth Ave in Room 101, presenters include
Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain, cultural critic Brian Holmes,
media
theorist Mark Andrejevic, and Jodi Dean, Professor of Political
Science
at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Erasmus Professor of the
Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University.
To view the full conference agenda and list of participants, please
visit http://www.digitallabor.org. The conference is free and open to
the public, but advance reservations are required online. Video
interviews with participants are available at
http://vimeo.com/user2103510/videos/. You can enter the event
discussion
through Twitter at http://twitter.com/idctweets.
The digital labor conference inaugurates Lang College’s new
conference series, “The Politics of Digital Media.” This ongoing
series will work in collaboration with associated institutions to form
working groups and networks to address issues from non-commercial
infrastructures for social media, free software, the future of public
media, artistic interventions, and curriculum about digital labor. The
second conference will take place in 2011 and focus on media
education.
To participate, please join the discussion mailing list through the
conference website.
This series is convened by Trebor Scholz, a new faculty member
in Lang’s Department of Culture and Media. Along with McKenzie Wark,
associate dean of Lang and author of A Hacker Manifesto, and
independent
filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, Lang College is establishing a next generation
liberal arts curriculum by teaching both critical research and
production tools to understand the pivotal role of culture and media
in
the contemporary world.
The conference is sponsored by the Eugene Lang College The New
School for Liberal Arts in cooperation with the Center for
Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design, The Yale
Information Society Project, The New School for Social Research, The
Change You Want To See, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New
York University's Council for Media and Culture, and n+1 Magazine.
ABOUT EUGENE LANG COLLEGE THE NEW SCHOOL FOR LIBERAL ARTS
With a diversity of students, faculty, and academics, Eugene Lang
College The New School for Liberal Arts is a seminar-style liberal
arts
college located in New York City that was established in 1985.
Remaining
consistent to its founding philosophy, Eugene Lang College grew out
of a
highly progressive freshman-year program developed at The New School
in
1973. Lang offers intensive liberal arts study as well as a faculty
committed to teaching undergraduates in an interdisciplinary context.
Areas of study include: culture and media; the arts; literary studies;
economics, education studies, history, philosophy; religious studies,
interdisciplinary science; social inquiry; and urban studies. For more
information, visit http://www.lang.newschool.edu.