CFP: ‘PAYING ATTENTION: DIGITAL MEDIA CULTURES AND GENERATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY’

[Michel Bauwens]

VIA Patrick Crogan :

"CALL FOR PAPERS


‘PAYING ATTENTION: DIGITAL MEDIA CULTURES AND GENERATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY’

A European Science Foundation Research Conference, Linkoping, Sweden 7 – 10th Sept 2010


Organised by the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of the West of England.


Chairs:

1. Professor Jonathan Dovey, Director, Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England
2. Dr Patrick Crogan, Department of Culture, Media and Drama, University of the West of England.


Confirmed Keynote Speakers:


1. Michel Bauwens, Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives
2. Bernard Stiegler, Director, Institut de recherche et d’innovation, Centre Georges Pompidou
3. Tiziana Terranova, Associate Professor in the Sociology of Communications, Universita di Napoli



‘Paying Attention’ concerns the politics, ethics and aesthetics of the attention economy. This is the social and technical milieu in which web native generations live much of their lives. It will address key questions like: What architectures of power are at work in the attention economy ? How is it building new structures of experience? What kinds of value does this architecture produce? ‘Paying Attention’ encourages dialogue between researchers from the fields of Cultural and New Media Studies, Education, Communications, Economics, Internet studies, Human Computer Interface Studies, Art and Design. It also seeks the input and insights of creative practitioners exploring critical and alternative uses of new media forms and technologies.


Through an ever-burgeoning technical apparatus of surveying, data mining and internet search-tailoring the attention of individual minds is estimated, costed, marketed, bought and sold. The ‘attention economy’ is enabled by technologies like Google’s web-crawler and search algorithms and agents and all kinds of metadata production. The dominance of this mode of conceiving and calculating attention, above all that of the young, can be seen to be bearing fruit in many national, regional and global phenomena. The traditional values of the public sphere are unmistakably reshaped though these processes.


‘Paying Attention’ is also interested in how practices such as videogaming, P2P Filesharing, pervasive media experimentation, and mobile phone activism also create detours, reinventions and reimaginings of the cultural program to which younger generations are recruited. While there is a concerted effort to commercialise and exploit these spaces according to the demands of the global media industries, web 2.0’s reorientation of social communication practices remains charged with an indeterminate techno-cultural potential which the conference seeks to explore.


[edit] Applications

Applications are invited for research paper contributions on any subject relevant to the conference’s aims. These may include the areas listed below to indicate the broad scope of relevant topics or subjects. The conference also seeks through its ‘Poster’ section contributions of an experimental kind from digital media and computer-based practitioners that engage with the conference theme of attention and experiential design in critical and/or creative ways. These may take the form of demos, animatics, ethical or critical design projects, installation treatments or concepts in progress. These will form a major part of the program as key elements in the articulation of viable technocultural futures.


Key Themes (Indicative list)

1. Education, Technique & Responsibility
2. The Political Economy of Digital Experience
3. Emerging forms of knowledge and value transmission
4. Ethical design, trust and security
5. Experiments with mediated attention and experience
6. Value in the new social spaces of digital culture
7. Records, archives and digital memories
8. Metadata, search algorithms and politics
9. Entertainment, marketing and attention technologies
10. Web 2.0 : Playbour and Grammatisation
11. Profiling Data Mining and Control
12. Pervasive media and remediated living spaces


Applications Due Date by March 30th, 2010