[ecrea] CFP: Media in Transition 8: public media, private media

MIT Comparative Media Studies
MIT Communications Forum
present

Media in Transition 8: public media, private media
International Conference
Conference dates: May 3-5, 2013 at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Conference website: web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit8 (watch for updates).

CALL FOR PAPERS

Submissions accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 1, 2013.
Please see the end of this call for
papers for submission instructions.

The distinction between public and private – where the line is drawn
and how it is sometimes inverted, the
ways that it is embraced or contested – says much about a culture. Media
have been used to enable, define
and police the shifting line between the two, so it is not surprising that
the history of media change to some
extent maps the history of these domains. Media in Transition 8 takes up
the question of the shifting nature
of the public and private at a moment of unparalleled connectivity,
enabling new notions of the socially
mediated public and unequalled levels of data extraction thanks to the
quiet demands of our Kindles,
iPhones, televisions and computers. While this forces us to think in new
ways about these long established
categories, in fact the underlying concerns are rooted in deep historical
practice. MiT8 considers the ways
in which specific media challenge or reinforce certain notions of the
public or the private and especially the
ways in which specific “texts” dramatize or imagine the public, the
private and the boundary between them.
It takes as its foci three broad domains: personal identity, the civic
(the public sphere) and intellectual
property.

Reality television and confessional journalism have done much to
invert the relations between private and
public. But the borders have long been malleable. Historically, we know
that camera-armed Kodakers and
telephone party lines threatened the status quo of the private; that the
media were complicit in keeping from
the public FDR’s disability and the foibles of the ruling elite; and that
paparazzi and celebrities are
strategically intertwined in the game of publicity. How have the various
media played these roles (and
represented them), and how is the issue changing at a moment when most of
our mediated transactions
leave data traces that not only redefine the borders of the private, but
that serve as commodities in their own
right?

The public, too, is a contested space. Edmund Burke’s late 18th
century invocation of the fourth estate linked
information flow and political order, anticipating aspects of Habermas’s
public sphere. From this
perspective, trends such as a siege on public service broadcasting, a
press in decline, and media
fragmentation on the rise, all ring alarm bells. Yet WikiLeaks and
innovative civic uses of media suggest a
sharp countertrend. What are the fault lines in this struggle? How have
they been represented in media
texts, enacted through participants and given form in media policy? And
what are we to make of the fate of a
public culture in a world whose media representations are increasingly
on-demand, personalized and
algorithmically-designed to please?

Finally, MiT8 is also concerned with the private-public rift that
appears most frequently in struggles over
intellectual property (IP). Ever-longer terms of IP protection combined
with a shift from media artifacts (like
paper books) to services (like e-journals) threaten long-standing
practices such as book lending (libraries)
and raise thorny questions about cultural access. Social media sites,
powered by users, often remain the
private property of corporations, akin to the public square’s replacement
by the mall, and once-public media
texts, like certain photographic and film collections, have been
re-privatized by an array of institutions. These
undulations in the private and public have implications for our texts
(remix culture), our access to them, and
our activities as audiences; but they also have a rich history of
contestation, evidenced in the copybook and
scrapbook, compilation film, popular song and the open source and creative
commons movement.








1





MiT8 encourages a broad approach to these issues, with specific
attention to textual practice, users, policy
and cultural implications. As usual, we encourage work from across media
forms and across historical
periods and cultural regions.

Possible topics include:



*
? Media traces: cookies, GPS data, TiVo and Kindle tracking



*
? The paradoxes of celebrity and the public persona



*
? Representing the anxieties of the private in film, television,
literature



*
? MMORPGs / identities / virtual publics



*
? The spatial turn in media: private consumption in public places



*
? Historical media panics regarding the private-public divide



*
? When cookies shape content, what happens to the public?



*
? Creative commons and the new public sphere



*
? Big data and privacy



*
? Party lines and two-way radio: amplifying the private



*
? The fate of public libraries in the era of digital services



*
? Methodologies of internet and privacy studies



*
? Creative commons, free software, and the new public sphere



*
? Public and civic WiFi access to the internet



*
? Surveillance, monitoring and their (dis)contents

Submit an Abstract and Short Bio

Short abstracts for papers should be about 250 words in a PDF or Word
format and should be sent as email
attachments to (mit8 /at/ mit.edu) no later than Friday, March 1, 2013. Please
include a short (75 words or
fewer) biographical statement.

We will be evaluating submissions on a rolling basis beginning in
November and will respond to every
proposal.

Include a Short Bibliography

For this year’s conference, we recommend that you include a brief
bibliography of no more than one page in
length with your abstract and bio.

Proposals for Full Panels

Proposals for full panels of three or four speakers should include a
panel title and separate abstracts and
bios for each speaker. Anyone proposing a full panel should recruit a
moderator.

Submit a Full Paper

In order to be considered for inclusion in a conference anthology,
you must submit a full version of your
paper prior to the beginning of the conference.

If you have any questions about the eighth Media in Transition
conference, please contact Brad Seawell at
(seawell /at/ mit.edu).











Roberta Pearson

Professor of Film and Television Studies
Head, Department of Culture, Film and Media
University of Nottingham
Nottingham, NG7 2RD
UK
+44(0)1159514250



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