[ecrea] Affect and Social Media#4 cfp

*Announcing a cfp for our 4^th A&SM conference to be hosted in 
Stratford, east London in Weds Nov 7.*

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*Call for Presentations
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*Affect & Social Media#4: Notifications from the Technological Nonconscious
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*Conference date: Wednesday, November 7^th 2018*


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*Venue: University Square Stratford Building, East London, UK*


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*Keynote: Patricia Ticineto Clough*


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*Keynote Panel (tbc)*

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*Conference Information Page: 
**https://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/affect-social-media4/***


To mark the publication of the first /Affect and Social Media/ 
<https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786604385/Affect-and-Social-Media-Emotion-Mediation-Anxiety-and-Contagion>book 
(Rowman and Littlefield, July 2018) we are very pleased to announce a 
cfp for a special A&SM#4 one day (free registration) conference.


We welcome 250 word abstracts for 15min presentations from scholars 
working across disciplinary borders, theories, concepts and 
methodologies (arts & humanities, social sciences, psychology, computer 
and data science etc.).


We especially welcome contributions from postgraduate students and early 
career researchers.


Abstracts should ideally respond creatively (and flexibly) to one of the 
six conference themes set out below.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: *Sept 15th 2018*.


Send a 250 word abstract as an email (no attachments) including full 
name, affiliation and email contact address to (t.d.sampson /at/ uel.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(t.d.sampson /at/ uel.ac.uk)>


<mailto:(t.d.sampson /at/ uel.ac.uk)>

Accepted abstracts will help to frame a series of subsequent discussion 
points/questions that will be addressed by our keynote panel (to be 
announced shortly).


*Conference Themes*


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*1. Unthinking*

The exponential rise of social media in the early twenty first century 
has drawn much critical attention in the humanities to a seemingly 
paradoxical human-computer relation. On one hand, human thought is both 
contemporaneous with, and frequently outperformed by, the 
uber-cognitions of corporate computational media technology. There is, 
indeed, much concern expressed about the possible absence of human 
consciousness from the computational world it created (Hayles, 2017; 
Hansen, 2015). On the other hand though, it would seem that the 
thoughts, feelings, behaviours and experiences of social media users, 
far from disappearing, are, often by design, /captured/ and /nudged/ 
from /here/ to /there/ by an expanding yet mostly imperceptible 
/technological nonconscious/ (Clough, 2000, Thrift, 2007, Grusin, 2010). 
What, if anything, is disappearing in the human-computer relation?


*2. Addicting *

Computational media can no longer simply be defined through the 
operations of narrowly defined cognitive machines implicated in 
clandestine data harvesting and the manipulation of individual users 
through e.g. psychographic profiling. Social media is a “social” machine 
of capture that /works on/ relations and shared felt experiences 
(Sampson, Maddison and Ellis, 2018), triggering habitual tendencies 
(Chun, 2016) that seem to produce mass media addictions (Bartlett and 
Bowden-Jones, 2017). As a major component part of the propagation of the 
technological nonconscious, social media is less defined today by the 
familiar /ease of connection/ discourses of Web 2.0 than it is by the 
/difficulty of disconnection/ (Karppi, 2018). Like other media of 
addiction (drugs, gambling, sex), social media hooks users in the event 
of the habit refrain, triggering subsequent emotional anxieties and 
contagions. Is social media addiction a problem of personal compulsion 
or collective masochism?


*3. Feeling *

Computational social media is a /feeling/ machine. It feels, or 
prehends, the event (Ellis, 2018). But this does not mean that it has 
feelings, in the sense in which humans feel. There are limitations 
imposed on the potential of affective computing to actually feel 
(Shaviro, 2015). Social media is constrained to the mere /reading/ of 
sentiment data, and like an actor, it can feign expressions of human 
emotion, but cannot feel them. However, the operational level of 
computational media can learn, algorithmically, from emotional 
experiences. It can pass on, or transmit, feelings. It can plant a 
behavioural hook in the user experience. Social media has an affective 
tone or atmosphere through which the human-computer relation strives. 
Feeling the event is a different matter.


*4. Sleeping*

/Always on/social media never sleeps! “Prolonged awakening, work without 
the limit of time, excessive light, surplus information… links… 
attentional capture is the new /Atopia/” (Neyrat, 2017). But the users 
of social media are often positioned as vulnerable, sleepwalking 
user-subjects: /the user unconscious/ (Clough, 2018), /the network 
somnambulist/ (Sampson, 2012, 2016). Like Crary’s (1999) earlier 
rendition of attentive analogue media subjects, the users of social 
media are simultaneously attentive and inattentive, and attracted and 
distracted by the fascinations of notifications, posts, tweets, likes, 
shares… This technological nonconscious, or /Unthought/ (Hayles, 2017) 
human-computer relation is not unconscious, as conventionally understood.


*5. Dreaming*

In /The User Unconscious: On Affect. Media, and Measure /(2018), 
Patricia Ticineto Clough argues that computational media networks have 
fundamentally affected what it means to be human. “We are both human and 
other-than-human.” This luminous text explains what it means to live, 
think, and dream from this “other-than-human perspective.” Here Clough 
moves to answer questions concerning the extent to which human lives are 
now animated in the multiple layers of these vast computational networks 
and how these layers radically transform our sense of self, 
subjectivity, sociality, and unconscious processes. How can we probe 
what it means to live, think, and dream through this newly animated 
technological nonconscious?


*6. Trumping *

Who is to blame for Trump? Trump on Twitter may seem like the 
unpredictable personal opinions of a racist, sexist, xenophobe that 
infects a population, but the technological nonconscious, or thing-self 
of the user unconscious, as Clough points out, “transgress[es] the 
separation of the personal and the networked.” It is the “affective 
tone” of social media itself that made Trump possible! Social media has 
given expressive support to a kind of microfascist populism or 
"population racism" that is currently spreading everywhere. What will it 
take to out trump the collective impulse that is Trump?



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