[ecrea] CFP: Empowered Users, Objective Violence and the Governance of Participatory Media

GTFO – Empowered Users, Objective Violence and the Governance of
Participatory Media

SWARM 2015 Symposium on Everyday Social Media


Friday 4th September 2015
University of Sydney, Australia

Deadline for proposals: July 3rd
Notification of acceptance: July 30th



Increasing online participation is now a political, cultural and economic
goal for government, health, education and creative industries. Yet the
everyday violence and exclusion that plays out on social media and other
participatory online forums deters many from self-expression and
interaction. It casts doubt on the capacity of institutions to facilitate
effective public dialogue, and raises doubts about the utility of speech
codes and moderation frameworks. As part of the SWARM 2015 conference on
online community management <http://swarmconference.com.au/> and Sydney
Social Media Week, this one day symposium brings together academics and
online media professionals working on innovative, systematic strategies to
better govern social media participation, to tackle the abuse of speech
rights online and support more inclusive user communities.


The symposium has a critical cultural concern with exploring factors in
the design, conduct, management and regulation of participatory media
environments that enable unruly and anti-social behaviours. In this it
investigates not only visible hate speech, but also what Žižek calls
objective violence – symbolic aggression and the systemic, hidden
relations of dominance and exploitation that underpin it.

The symposium keynote will be  Whitney Phillips, author of This is Why We
Can’t
Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and
Mainstream Culture and co-author, with Ryan Milner of Between Play and
Hate:
Antagonism, Mischief, and Humor Online (forthcoming 2017, Polity Press).

We are seeking papers that raise new challenges for social media and
online community governance and regulation, and propose new means of
addressing them, but would welcome specific contributions that address:

·       Responses to cyberhate, doxxing and digilantism
·       The impact of pseudonymity and impersonation on self-expression
·       Abuse reporting
·       Critiques of Terms of Service, codes of conduct and online speech
regulation
·       Computational moderation and the economics of participatory control
·       Verified users and other behavioural incentives
·       Co-creating standards for community governance
·       Tactical and proactive moderation
·       Porting or closing communities
·       User profiling and identity management
·       Platform design for self-moderating communities


The symposium will be hosted by the Department of Media and Communications
and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ Everyday Social Media
research group. Papers will be considered for a themed journal edition.


Abstracts of 150-200 words should be submitted to Dr Fiona Martin
(fiona.martin /at/ sydney.edu.au) and Dr Jonathon Hutchinson
(Jonathon.hutchinson /at/ sydney.edu.au) by 3rd July 2015 for consideration for
inclusion in the symposium.








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