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Dear IDC,<br>
<br>
TripleC just published a review I wrote of the conference, which I left
feeling more optimistic than I have in a while about where all this is
leading, despite the seriousness of the problems that many of us are
trying to keep firmly in view. I've pasted a copy of the review below
the reference to TripleC.<br>
<br>
David<br>
<br>
Golumbia, D. (2009). Conference Report: The Internet as Playground and
Factory (November 12-14, 2009, The New School, New York City, USA). <i>tripleC<br>
- Cognition, Communication, Co-operation</i>, 7(2), 401-403. Retrieved
2009-11-19, from <a
href="http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/152/143"
target="_blank">http://www.triple-c.at/index.<wbr>php/tripleC/article/view/152/<wbr>143</a><br>
<br>
=========<br>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 16pt;">Conference
Report: The
Internet as Playground and Factory<o:p></o:p><br>
(November 12-14, 2009, The
New School, New York<o:p></o:p> City,
USA)<o:p></o:p></span></b><br>
<span style="font-size: 16pt;">David Golumbia, University of Virginia<o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">Christian Fuchs provided an
excellent overview of the methods and themes
in evidence at the Playbor conference in his recent <a
href="http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/150/128">review</a>;
here I want to stand back and make some observations about the
functions of the
kinds of work done at the conference, the role of academic inquiry in
the
construction of media, and the possible uses of critical studies in the
world
of practice. More than that, I want to draw our attention to a
potentially
groundbreaking change in the functions of critical theory and even
academic
inquiry. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">I will admit to being very
surprised by this conference. Like many, it
turns out, I felt the original theme of the conference was a bit
“light.” This
is by no means to fault the organizers; it’s a subject that many people
have
been talking about, and that many of us have a lot to say about; it’s
just that
the basic questions appear to come mostly out of commercial software
products
(Facebook, Twitter, <i style="">World of Warcraft</i>),
which few of us in critical studies of the digital world consider
particularly
transformational, even in the long history of ICTs. But as the
frequently
contentious discussion on the IDC list preceding the conference showed,
it
helped to define a fault line in our thinking and theorizing that
ultimately
proved electrifying.<o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">I have been at many conferences in
my life, but I have never been at one
like this. My impression was not of academics trying to hone their
theory to
fit the latest facts, although some of that went on. My impression was
of close
to 1000 incredibly smart people, mostly but not all academics, from a
variety
of backgrounds, experiences, methodologies and orientations, trying to
stand
with as much critical distance as possible from what is perhaps the
definitive
technological and media change of recent times, trying to frame it in
terms of
the historical, cultural, and geographical changes on top of which it
lays, and
trying to understand what is happening and why it is happening as it
happens. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">As much as the Frankfurt school
critics, and later the critical theorists
of the late 20<sup>th</sup> century, engaged profoundly with every
media form
of their time, something about this conference struck me quite
differently.
Because of the distributed nature of ICTs, we all come to the subject
with
different levels of technical skill and even production commitments in
the very
medium we are discussing. This is new; we are closer to our object of
study,
without necessarily being enmeshed in its corporate sites of
production, than
we could have been in radio, television, movies, and even earlier
regimes of
ICTs; this is in part exactly the reason that we are wondering whether
“social
technologies” like web 2.0 can distribute skill and understanding more
widely
than they can have been before.<o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">I was struck by this most
forcefully at the conference’s closing panel
discussion. My sense was that a body of knowledge—a knowledge of how
dramatic,
how forceful, and how ideological have been the historical conditions
out of
which our contemporary moment emerged, perhaps summarized most
forcefully by
Jon Beller’s invocation of the Armageddon that about 2/3 of the world
has
experienced as “we” have created the world of IT—was coming into direct
contact
with a practice, namely the computerization of the world. That very
fact is
different from the printing press, the telegraph, the railroad, radio,
tv, and
film. At the panel Trebor Scholz mentioned that employees from Yahoo,
Microsoft
and Google appeared to have attended the conference, though none of
them agreed
to speak. This seemed just right. The knowledge contained in that room
was too
well-earned to be dismissed by the commercial powers that largely run
our
world; the possibility that we do have some sort of technical purchase
from
which to effect real change, again, very close to the subject of the
conference, seemed to come to the fore again. Perhaps in that room, we
understood that technologies almost never, of themselves, produce
positive
social change; that when we are sold a story that some particular
communication
technology and its distribution (as has been done with every prior
technology—and can it possibly be different this time?) will change the
world,
too often in the past that story has concealed very much the opposite.
Yet very
few of us were willing to reject the idea, as one question put it
toward the
very end, that “there really might be something different about
information
technology.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">Is there? We can’t know, unless and
until “it” happens, until we see
mass-distributed ICTs truly undo totalitarian governments, make
impossible the
concentration of finance capital and its domination over almost the
entire
world, or draw input from democratic polities in a way that seems
structurally
different from prior methods, or distribution of technology to the poor
and
disenfranchised helps them to attain self-sufficiency without
sacrificing their
own self-understanding in the process. <o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">The advent of ICTs presents
challenges and opportunities within every
sphere of human activity; the advertisement of its opportunities often
masks
the challenges ICTs pose with its other hand while we aren’t looking.
The world
is already networked and the world will never be networked; we are
powerful
actors in the network and we are dwarfed by the oligopolies that mange
too much
of it. We have never before had a major leader of innovation use “Don’t
Be
Evil” as a regulative ideal in the Kantian sense, despite the suspicion
that
many of us have that such an ideal can largely be realized only in the
breach.
At another panel someone asked: “if Google is evil, what should replace
it?”
Maybe something better, but maybe something worse. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">I saw this challenge as profoundly
reciprocal, and here was something
really new, and to my mind inspiring. I heard the vague presence of
Google,
Microsoft and Yahoo (and a few representatives of their general mindset
among
the attendees) saying: “if your methods really have anything for us,
show us.”
And I heard us saying back: “if this ‘revolution’ really is for the
good, show
us.” Both sides, I think, were serious in their message for the other.
In this
sense, I heard a call to responsibility to those of us from the world
of
critical studies of ICTs: we need to push even harder on all the fronts
we’ve
opened: we need to keep working to develop protocols that pull society
toward
its own ethical sense of itself; we need to keep standing and working
outside
of protocol, making outrageous accusations, worrying about catastrophes
that
may never happen. In this global call to bring our political and
ethical
insights into direct contact with the object of our critique, both
socially and
technologically, something really may be different this time—and it’s
up to us,
maybe especially the people in that room and the people not there many
of us
were trying to keep in our minds—to bring that promise into being. <span
style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
David Golumbia
Assistant Professor
Media Studies, English, and Linguistics
University of Virginia</pre>
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