[csaa-forum] Digital Media Research Seminar: Ulises Mejías, Tanya Notley, Hart Cohen

[Ned Rossiter]

Digital Media Research Seminar
School of Humanities and Communication Arts
http://www.uws.edu.au/hca

Date: 18 June 2012
Time: 10.30am-3.30pm
Venue: EA4.21 Parramatta Campus, UWS

All welcome.
Please RSVP to Ned Rossiter n.rossiter at uws.edu.au<mailto:n.rossiter at uws.edu.au> by Thursday 14 June. Readings will then be distributed via email to participants.

Program:
10.30-12.30 – Readings and round table discussion of chapters from Ulises Mejías’s book Unliked: The Limits of Digital Networks (2012)

Respondent: Tanya Notley

12.30-1.30 – Lunch (provided)

1.30-3.30 – Paper by Hart Cohen and round table discussion

Further reading details:
Ulises Mejías, Introduction and Chapters 1 & 2, Unliked: The Limits of Digital Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)

Hart Cohen, ‘From Social Media to Social Energy (ενέργεια):  The Idea of the ‘Social” in Social Media’, 2012.

Ulises Mejías
Abstract
Unliked: The Limits of Digital Networks (forthcoming in Fall 2012 from the University of Minnesota Press) presents a critical examination of the digital network as technological template for organizing and determining society, a template that increases participation while simultaneously also increasing certain forms of inequality. The selected chapters describe the emergence of the network as an episteme, a model for organizing knowledge and action according to a reductionist ‘nodocentric’ logic, and expose the limits of trying to counter this logic on its own terms. Additionally, the chapters situate the digital network as part of a media economy that reproduces inequality through a hegemonic – yet consensual and pleasurable – participatory culture. One of goals of the book is to consider the motivations and strategies for disidentifying from the network and, by presenting a theoretical model for making its logic obsolete, open up spaces for imagining identities beyond nodes.

Bio
Ulises A. Mejías is director ofthe IntegratedMedia graduateprogram andAssistant Professorin theCommunication Studies Departmentat theState University of NewYork, Collegeat Oswego.His bookon DigitalNetworks isscheduled forpublication inFall of2012 by the Universityof Minnesota Press. http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/


Tanya Notley
Bio
During the past 15 years Dr Tanya Notley has moved back and forth from working with community/social justice /human rights organisations and working in academia where she researches and teaches the use of media in these contexts. Tanya is currently involved in practice-based research with two organisations whose work focuses on the use of digital technologies and networks for social and environmental justice and activism: Tactical Technology Collective (http://tacticaltech.org) and EngageMedia (http://www.engagemedia.org). In her response to Ulises presentation, Tanya will explore the implications of the theories and ideas discussed formedia activism and advocacy.


Hart Cohen
Abstract
My interest in this paper is to explore how the current extensive use of ‘social’ in its adjectival qualification of media, and transformation into a compound noun, has replaced a complex term and its preferred meanings. Within the current usages of ‘social media’ such as with the popular platform, Facebook, the social collapses into a term of mediation and stands for the range of connecting instances in which media performs linkages across platforms and virtual places. In more recent journalistic contexts, the use of social media has been tied to the activation of political and grassroots movements: in the case of the so-called Arab Spring and the recent London Riots. Despite the clear differences in political motivation and organisational tactics, it is the use of social media that binds these events in the mainstream media account of them. I would argue, then, that while the ease of formulation of messages within these platforms and applications construct a wholly different and distorted idea of the social, the use of social media as a communalising tool is continuous with the intellectual traditions that made the ‘social’ a powerful concept for theorising and thinking about civilizational change.

Using Laclau’s work on the logic of populism, I link the examples of the Arab Spring and the London Riots and the use of social media to ambiguities of populism identified by Laclau. I adopt the term ‘social energy’ to suggest a way of mobilising a broader complex of public emotions associated with populist expression.

Bio
Dr Hart Cohen is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is Research and Higher Degrees Director in the School, is a member of the Institute for Culture and Society and supervises a number of MA (research), DCA and PhD students. He has published widely in the field of visual anthropology, communications and film studies. Hart is co-author of Screen Media Arts: An Introduction to Concepts and Practices for Oxford University Press (2009) and founding editor of the Global Media Journal (Australian Edition), http://www.commarts.uws.edu.au/gmjau/index.html. He currently leads a team in the ARC Linkage funded project: ‘Digital Archives, Datadiversity and Discoverability: The Strehlow Collection as Knowledge Resource for Remote Indigenous Communities’.


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Ned Rossiter
Professor of Communication
School of Humanities and Communication Arts
University of Western Sydney
Sth Werrington Campus
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith NSW 2751
Australia
+ 61 2 9852 5196 (tel)
+ 61 2 9852 5424 (fax)
n.rossiter at uws.edu.au<mailto:n.rossiter at uws.edu.au>
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