[Commlist] Stories of Digital Radicals: Call for Submissions

Stories of Digital Radicals: Call for Submissions

The newly formed Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS) at the 
University of Pennsylvania invites submissions of stories of digital 
radicals from around the world. A digital radical is a person with a 
radical relationship to digital technologies. This relationship could be 
reflected in an attitude or belief, a daily practice, a political act or 
commitment, a way of life, and more. As to what is radical about the 
relationship, we will leave it for you to decide. It could be about 
forms of disengagement from social media, or ways of deploying them for 
social and political causes. We welcome stories about both well-known 
public figures and ordinary individuals around us. They may be people 
you know directly, or people you know through the media or your 
research. The stories may be biographical or autobiographical. The 
important thing is that you have a story to tell about the individual, 
and your story illustrates a vision for what you think of as a radical 
approach to digital technologies. The current conditions of social media 
and technological developments demand radical new visions and new politics.

Stories of individuals are becoming a rarity in our digital age. 
Contemporary society is saturated with data, metrics, and 
quantification. Our personal traces on the web are harvested and turned 
into data to serve commercial, political, and other purposes beyond our 
control. Individual experiences are reduced to numbers. Against this 
background, we call for stories.

Walter Benjamin lamented in 1936 that “the art of storytelling is coming 
to an end.” To Benjamin, storytelling is about the exchange of 
experiences and the reason for the demise of the art of storytelling was 
that “experience has fallen in value.” Experience has indeed fallen in 
value; the art of storytelling has surely further declined in times of 
Tweeting and WeChatting. But we are not resigned to this condition. We 
believe the art of storytelling can be revived in the digital age. 
Indeed, at a time when experience continues to fall in value, it is 
imperative to turn to storytelling as a way of cherishing human 
experience and promoting social justice. Numerous digital storytelling 
efforts are already happening around the world. We hope your stories of 
digital radicals will not only become part of this growing current, but 
will also shape our mission at CDCS.
We welcome submissions at any time. Submissions may be between 2,000 and 
8,000 words, prepared in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style. 
Essays will be published on a regular basis in an online magazine called 
The Digital Radical, which will be hosted on a CDCS website currently 
under design. To be considered for the first issue, please send your 
submission before October 15, 2019.

A reading committee will select ones for publication. We will provide 
the authors of all selected essays with a modest honorarium. Selected 
authors may also be invited to speak at the inaugural symposium on 
Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania on April 
3, 2020. An anthology of “Stories of Digital Radicals” may be published 
in the future.  Please email all submissions in Word format with your 
contact information to: (cdcs /at/ asc.upenn.edu).

For more information about CDCS, please visit 
https://www.asc.upenn.edu/research/research-centers/center-digital-culture-and-society 
and follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/cdcspenn.
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