[ecrea] Track at Italian STS conference - INTERNET AND NEW PRODUCTIVE PARADIGMS

with 2 colleagues I am running a track at forthcoming Italian STS
conference "EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, SOCIAL WORLDS"  this June 21-23,
2012, in Rovigo. Excuse me for cross-posting.

The CfP of our track might be of interest for some people in this
list. Feel free to submit an abstract. :)

Abstracts (in Italian or English) should be sent as email attachment
(as MS word or Rich Text Format) to the track’s coordinators (and
carbon copied to (4convegnosts /at/ gmail.com)) by March 1, 2012. Abstracts
with a maximum length of 500 words should contain the title, author's
name, affiliation and contact details including e-mail. Further
information on the conference on: www.stsitalia.org

TRACK 4: INTERNET AND NEW PRODUCTIVE PARADIGMS: THE STS CONTRIBUTION

Convenors: Stefano De Paoli (Fondazione<ahref, Trento,
(stefano /at/ ahref.eu)), Cristiano Storni (University of Limerick,
(cristiano.storni /at/ ul.ie))
Maurizio Teli (Fondazione<ahref, Trento, (maurizio /at/ ahref.eu))

The exponential diffusion of the Internet on a global scale shows the
emergence of new and socio-technical arrangements that seem to call
into question our traditional separation between production and
consumption. For many, we are witnessing the emergence and
consolidation of a completely new production paradigm where production
processes are decentralised, distributed among an undisclosed mass of
actors often proactive, sometimes without a predictable path. The
examples of this grow daily: Wikipedia, free and open source software
and hardware, folksonomies, crowdsourcing platforms, online
hacktivism, Do-it-Yourself communities, and so on.
New concepts have been developed in an attempt to capture these new
practices and these new socio-technical arrangements: in the late
1970s, Toffler (1980) theorized the emergence of the prosumer, both
producer and consumer of goods. This phenomenon of convergence between
the producer and consumer has stimulated research to generate new
concepts such as "wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006),"
commons-based peer production
"(Benkler, 2006)," produsage"(Bruns, 2008), and ideas like the
Hack-tivism (Auty, 2004) or Mash-ups technology (Hartmann et al.
2006). At the same time, however, we are witnessing the emergence of
criticisms that highlight that these innovative aspects are the
perpetuation, more or less obvious, of the traditional capitalist
logic. This  seems to fuel disputes around the themese of control,
surveillance, exploitation of intellectual property management,
deskilling, etc. (Lash,  2002, Terranova, 2000, De Paoli and Storni,
2011).
Instead of taking the emergence of the new production paradigm as a
matter of fact, the goal of this track is to describe and understand
the practices and dynamics that characterize the sociotechnical
collectives behind the phenomena mentioned above, and discuss how they
help us to rethink not only the traditional division of labour between
production and consumption, but mostly what we mean with the terms
work, production, consumption, and property (commons) in our
information society.
In this sense to invite contributions and case studies in different
areas to discuss, but are not limited to:
- the role of STS in the study of new emerging practices in the
information society;
- how to rethink and/or deconstruct empirically the concepts of
production, consumption, property, work and good: debates,
controversies and new
definitions;
- doing and undoing the boundaries between production and consumption
(or design and use);
- new conceptions of labor and its distribution;
- Do-it-Yourself and Do-it-with-Others: new practices?

References
Auty, C., 2004, “Political Hacktivism: tool of the underdog or scourge
of cyberspace?” in  Aslib proc: new information perspectives, Vol. 56,
No. 4, pp. 212-22
Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of the Networks: How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven and London: Yale University
Press.
Bruns, A., 2008, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From
production to produsage. New York: Peter Lang.
De Paoli S. and Storni C, 2011, “Produsage in hybrid networks:
sociotechnical skills in the case of Arduino”. New Review of
Hypermedia and Multimedia, 17(1), 31-52.
Hartmann, B. et al., 2006,  Hacking, Mashing, Gluing: A Study of
Opportunistic Design and Development, Technical Report, Stanford
University Computer Science Department.
Lash, Scott. 2002. Critique of Information. London: Sage
Tapscott, D. and Williams, A. 2006, Wikinomics: how mass collaboration
changes everything. New York: Portfolio.
Toffler, A., 1980, The Third Wave. New York: Morrow.

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