[ecrea] First-of-its-Kind Conference Examines How Social Media are Transforming the Economy, Labor and Society

> NEWS RELEASE
> 
> Media Contacts:
> 
> Bridget Fisher, 212.229.5667 x3094; (fisherb /at/ newschool.edu)
> Sandra Ordonez, 212.229.5667 x3994; (sandratordonez /at/ hotmail.com)
> 
> EUGENE LANG COLLEGE PRESENTS:
> 
> ³THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY²
> 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, ³The
> Politics of Digital Media.²
> 
> "Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are changing the way citizens
> can speak truth to power,² said Neil Gordon, dean of Eugene Lang College
> The New School for Liberal Arts. ³Social 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.²
> 
> 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,² said Trebor Scholz, conference convener
> and assistant professor of Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang
> College. ³ 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.²
> 
> 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 ³Facebook Re-enactments,² 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 College¹s new
> conference series,  ³The Politics of Digital Media.²  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 Lang¹s 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, Yale
> Information Society Project, 16 Beaver Group, 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.
> 
>
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