[Commlist] Dark Ages 2.0: Social Media And Their Impact_15th International Conference of Sociocybernetics

*15th International Conference Of Sociocybernetics*
*Urbino, Italy 25-29 June 2019*
*“Dark Ages 2.0”: Social Media And Their Impact*
*
*
https://easychair.org/cfp/ICSC2019

In 2009 the ISA Research Committee 51 on Sociocybernetics hosted its 
annual conference in Urbino. The topic of the conference was the impact 
of the, then emerging, social media technologies on society. In the 
call, the “web 2.0” turn was explicitly associated to the advent of the 
printing press. The title of the conference was Modernity 2.0: emerging 
social media technologies and their impact. Along the line of visionary 
founding fathers of cybernetics and systems theory, the call solicited 
interdisciplinary contribution to explore the possibilities and tackling 
the challenges of a “new extraordinary change that we can barely 
describe today”.

A decade later, having witnessed the first impact of social media on 
society, it is about time to call for a new sociocybernetic forum to 
reflect on what we learned so far and the future perspectives.

The anticipated disruptive potentials of digital and social media 
unleashed on our society but the outcomes appear to be darker than what 
envisioned by scholars ten years ago. The entire industry is heavily 
concentrated in the hands of few organizations (Facebook, Google, 
Amazon, Apple and Microsoft). Our mediated private and public 
conversations increasingly take place on powerful platforms owned by 
private organizations that, in a classic feedback loop, leverage these 
data to target advertisements tailored to our tastes and preferences. 
Contents on these platforms are sorted and filtered by proprietary 
algorithms that prioritize most engaging contents. Traffic to news 
source is increasingly driven by these algorithms and so are their 
revenues. For the first time in history, a handful of global private 
organizations are more powerful and rich than an entire country. At the 
same time, their management appears unable to address problematic issues 
such as misinformation and disinformation spreading rampant on social 
media platforms and messaging apps. The goal of making the “world more 
open and connected” comes with unintended consequences. Billions of 
people interacting in an unprecedented complex mediated digital 
environment proved to be hard to govern even for the owner of the 
platform itself.

Once again, the original issues of steering and controlling at the roots 
of cybernetics seems to be a core concept to understand a society where 
human beings increasingly interact through and with machines. The 
dialectic between control of these platforms (and lack of thereof) is 
central to face some of the main challenges of contemporary society. The 
exploitation of behaviours and individual choices, of contents generated 
and shared by users feed the algorithms and create the internal order. 
And, at the same time, the variety produced by individuals is used to 
increase the internal complexity of the system itself. Visible permanent 
public conversations and interactions are increasingly scrutinized and 
analyzed to get a real time pulse of the public opinion. As a result, 
these real time quantified attention indicators become a target worth to 
be hacked through unauthentic users and behaviours aimed at inflating 
likes, shares and reaches of certain contents and ideas. In a 
quintessential exemplification of the effects of self-observation in 
social systems, the public opinion observed through the distorted mirror 
of social media affects citizen opinions and behaviors. The whole 
misinformation and disinformation issue filed under the “fake news” 
label calls into account the role played by the observer and the 
divisiveness, pointed out by Heinz von Foerster, brought by those 
claiming to speak the Truth. Claude Shannon’s original concept of 
information as a function of the probabilities help to explain why made 
up news tend to travel fast and spread quicker than legitimate news 
stories. Furthermore, Luhmann’s description of the codes that 
differentiate functional systems in modern society supports the idea of 
a co-existence of multiple different perspectives that goes beyond the 
distinction between true and false (or the domain of the system of science).

The goal of this conference is therefore to bring scholars together to 
explore, within a sociocybernetic approach, the issues at stake.

_Possible topics should include, but are not limited to:_

 1. Sociocybernetics governance of social media platforms;
 2. Participatory democracy;
 3. Local issues with respect to a particular geographical region,
    political entity or cultural or ethnic group;
 4. Global issues affecting all mankind in the 21st century;
 5. Emerging technologies and the link between micro, meso, macro levels
    of individual actors and social institutions, respectively;
 6. Social systems and economic models of the web;
 7. Participation on the web (politics, business and entertainment);
 8. Culture, knowledge and social impact of the ArtificialIntelligence
    as a commodity;
 9. Cyberculture, knowledge and local communities;
10. Algorithms accountability;
11. Media literacy and how it may backfire;
12. The public/private distinction on the Internet;
13. Internet subcultures;
14. The human use of human beings.

Proposals (also including innovative formats that go beyond traditional 
papers) with an orientation to sociocybernetics addressing other topics 
(conceptual, methodological, practical) are also welcomed.

*Submission Guidelines
*
Abstracts should be sent in English. Please submit an Abstract of 
200-300 words together with an Extended abstract of 750-1000 words 
(excluding references) for review purposes. The former will be published 
in the RC51 Newsletter, included in the abstracts booklet made available 
to conference participants and published as part of the conference 
programme on the RC51 website.

*Important dates*
February 1, 2019: Detailed abstract
March 1, 2019: Notification of acceptance
May 24, 2019: Registration
June 1: Full paper (to be considered for JoS special issue)

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