Platform Politics - Call for Papers
A multidisciplinary conference in Cambridge, UK, 29-30 April, 2011
Wired recently announced the 'death' of the Web, based on the
premise that platforms are becoming the primary mode of access to
the Internet. Platforms are portals or applications that offer
specific Internet services, frameworks for social interaction, or
interfaces to access other networked communications and information
distribution systems. Additionally the prevalence of mobile
computing and its operating systems, that prioritise Internet access
via 'apps' not web browsers, is intensifying this transformation,
and this model is now being applied to tablet computing - and may
well soon spread into general computing and computer mediated
communication. These platforms are able to take advantage of the
scale-free architecture of the Internet to built very large user
bases and communities of interest. However, unlike the
world-wide-web, these platforms are often proprietorial, have closed
protocols and operate as a kind of privatised public space. As such
platforms themselves are becoming the object and enabler of
politics, but also new arenas of control. Therefore network politics
can be seen as pertaining not only to the question of content (what
questions, agendas and activities are taken up and promoted as
political?) but also to the role of platforms and apps as political
'objects' that shape the form and the structure of political mediation.
Such proprietorial platforms as Facebook and Twitter have been used
in the various modes of organization of political events, both on
and offline, and have been discussed with enthusiasm as new tools
for stimulating the democratic process, with electoral campaigns,
and as organising tools to influence public opinion and create
pressure groups. At the same time the proprietorial nature of these
platforms and their role as an integral part of a 'communicative
capitalism' works to create a situation of great ambiguity and has
not gone unnoticed in either network theory or software development.
There is, however, an emerging movement of software development for
activism, and non-proprietorial social networking, that places at
its core the values of openness, decentralisation and not-for-profit
projects - such as Diaspora and Thimbl - that are emblematic of the
alternative political economies of network politics. So the question
of how politics is increasingly processed through the form of
software and hardware design, as well as the hacking of closed
platforms and creation of peer-to-peer networks, is a pressing one.
This conference thus wishes to engage with the full range of these
concerns and to map out the place of software, hardware and online
platforms, as a realm of both control, but also as opportunity for
radical political practices, in the 'democratising' of democracy,
and in the challenge to the 'interpassive' political economy of
communicative capitalism.
Hence, this conference is interested in such questions as:
What are the platforms on which network politics takes place
and what can we think of as political 'action' in this context?
What are the particular forms of platform politics and how
can we theorize such forms and practices?
Can we extend critical theory into such new modalities as
media critique through software?
How to think circuit bending, hardware hacking and such
practices as political?
What are the future forms and new conceptualisations of
hacking that merit attention?
Can we really conceive the 'openness' of FLOSS (Free, Libre,
Open Source Software) as a genuinely radical practice or rather
another circuit in the production of communicative capital?
Is it too late to 'de-monetise' social media?
We invite theoretical interventions, empirical papers, as well as
case studies from theorists, practitioners, and activists to engage
with the question of "platform politics".
Keynote talks to be delivered by: Nick Couldry (Goldsmiths College,
University of London), Michael Goddard (University of Salford), Tim
Jordan (Open University/King's College, University of London),
Dmytri Kleiner (Telekommunisten), Tiziana Terranova (University of
Naples, L'Orientale),
Please send your abstracts of up to 400 words by Tuesday 1 February
2011 to both organisers: (joss.hands /at/ anglia.ac.uk) and
(jussi.parikka /at/ anglia.ac.uk) - acceptances will be announced by
Tuesday15 February 2011.
This conference is part of the project Exploring New Configurations
of Network Politics, funded by the AHRC and situated at Anglia
Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. The project's previous events have
tackled methodological and theoretical questions underpinning
network politics, as well as new object oriented approaches for
interdisciplinary analysis.
More info on the project:
<http://www.networkpolitics.org>http://www.networkpolitics.org
