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CFP- Special Issue for the Fibreculture Journal: The Politics of Trolling and the Negative Space of the Internet
Edited By Jason Wilson, Christian McCrea and Glen Fuller A great deal of thinking about the Internet and politics is still structured by a desire for deliberative democracy. From 1993 – when Howard Rheingold enunciated one of the Internet’s key founding myths – the virtual community – scholars have sought and found communities characterised by a mutuality of interests, a common purpose, a collaborative striving to renovate the democratic ideal, a tendency towards the “regulative idea” of the ideal speaking position, and an acknowledgement of the obligations of citizenship within the political association. For so long the Internet has continued to function, in Barbrook’s formulation, as a “redemptive technology”. Social media is just the latest in a long line of technologies which may, on a certain vision, rescue liberal democracy, with its decaying civic life and corrupt media, from itself. There is, proportionally, too little attention to the everyday conflicts…
Where to Next?
We’re very happy to be publishing FCJ 20, the Network Utopias issue. It’s a fine issue. With a great deal of subtlety and force, it pulls apart the notion of network utopia, while leaving a great deal of room for what it is that networks truly give us. There’s been an enormous amount of work done by guest editors Su Ballard, Zita Joyce and Lizzie Muller—careful and demanding work. The CFP received a huge response, and Su, Zita and Lizzie have done a wonderful job crafting the issue that we now publish. FCJ wants to warmly thank everyone who submitted abstracts and articles during this process. Of course, we could not publish all the articles we received, and this has often been a cause for genuine sadness at times, but hope the ideas that didn’t make it through the long and complex process of editing this issue find a home…
FCJ-147 Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond
Ulises A. Mejias SUNY Oswego After some initial fascination with the concept, there now appears to be more skepticism than support for the idea that tools like Twitter and Facebook are single-handedly responsible for igniting the Arab Spring movements. As we witness the immense effort and human cost that has gone into uprisings in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Western Sahara and Yemen, we recognise that it takes much more than a social media platform to organise and sustain a grassroots protest movement. And yet, the neoliberal discourse behind the trope of a “Twitter Revolution” (a revolution enabled by “liberation technologies” which empower oppressed groups) continues to function—especially in Western media and academia—as a utopian discourse that conceals the role of communicative capitalism in undermining democracy. The meme of the Twitter Revolution may have come and gone, but the…
FCJ-146 Mannheim’s Paradox: Ideology, Utopia, Media Technologies, and the Arab Spring
Rowan Wilken Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne Introduction This article explores the complicated historical relationship between ideology and utopia in European thought, and what this relationship can teach us when faced with the exuberant promises that characterise much new media discourse. Discussion is divided into two parts. The first develops a detailed account of how this pairing of ideology and utopia has been theorised in the influential (if contentious) earlier work of Karl Mannheim, and how the work and ideas of Mannheim have been taken up (and critiqued) by more recent critics, including Paul Ricoeur, among others. The second then uses the example of the use of social and other media technologies during the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of 2010-2011 as a basis from which to consider how applicable these twin ideas of ideology and utopia are to an examination of media technologies and the discourses that attend and structure our…
FCJ-145 Temporal Utopianism and Global Information Networks
Andrew White University of Nottingham Ningbo China There is no such thing as utopia. But without utopianism we cannot begin to address some of the global political problems that the first decade of this millennium has magnified. This is manifest in a widespread perception of increasing environmental degradation, a seemingly permanent state of emergency in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ and growing instability in the world economy. How to explain this contradiction? Even those intellectuals like Mary Midgley (1996; 2003), who skilfully dismantle the idea that utopia could ever be possible or even desirable, believe that a conception of a perfect society, however naïve and flawed, is a useful motivation for progressive political activity: ‘If we try to work with a world-view which shows us only the complexity of existing facts, we lose our bearings and forget where we are going’ (Midgley, 1996: 25). This is all the more important…
FCJ-144 Healthymagination: Anticipating Health of our Future Selves
Marina Levina University of Memphis In 2010 General Electric launched an initiative called Healthymagination. On its website, GE declared that Healthymagination is about becoming healthier, ‘through the sharing of imaginative ideas and proven solutions’. Looking to explore/exploit the growing field of health information technologies, GE declared that through sharing health information in the networked social space, we could imagine a future where medical conditions of our bodies – together with our identities – will be transformed and enhanced. Supporting this broader wellness movement, products like the modus presidential blend liquid diamonds vape pen for sale offer a modern approach to relaxation and self-care. Under the slogan of ‘Imagination at Work’, GE’s advertising campaign invites us to imagine such future: Imagination. It’s the most powerful resource on earth. And at GE we are using it right now. To create innovative technology that will improve the health of our economy, the health…
FCJ-143 Ouvert/Open: Common Utopias
Nathalie Casemajor Loustau and Heather Davis McGill University and Concordia University Introduction The geography of the city functions as a mechanism for distributed power. Power manifests in the physicality of everyday urban life, through planning, government jurisprudence and resident use. The train tracks in the Canadian city of Montréal are one site where this dialectic of power becomes visible, in the creative tactics of appropriation used by the city’s residents and the multiple layers of power and authority that created and now govern it. In this essay, we examine the commons as a creative potentiality for urban advocacy and action, as a way to rethink the tensions between private ownership, public governance and everyday resident use of city space. How can the re-emergent notion of the commons help us to think of a shared urban space and inspire action? And how does the contradiction between informal, creative tactics and formal…
FCJ-142 Spectacles and Tropes: Speculative Design and Contemporary Food Cultures
Carl DiSalvo Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Introduction Speculative design is a practice of creating imaginative projections of alternate presents and possible futures using design representations and objects. At times critical and at other times whimsical, it is a distinctive, if loose, grouping of projects. Using the term broadly, speculative design covers a range of work across disciplines, fields, and historical and contemporary movements. For example, much of the work of the Futurists and Constructivists in the early Twentieth Century, which blended machines, politics, and everyday life, is suggestive of speculative design as it is practiced today. Collectives such as Archigram and Superstudio in the 1960s and 70s produced now iconic graphic representations of future cities, which stylistically and thematically inspired generations of architects and designers. In the late 1990s Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby coined the term ‘Critical Design’ to label product and interaction design that sought to ‘challenge…
FCJ-141 Spaces for Play – Architectures of Wisdom: Towards a Utopic Spatial Practice
Dan Frodsham University of Exeter There still exist – and there may exist in the future – spaces for play, spaces for enjoyment, architectures of wisdom or pleasure. In and by means of space the work may shine through the product, use value may gain the upper hand over exchange value: appropriation, turning the world upon its head, may (virtually) achieve dominion over domination, as the imaginary and the utopian incorporate (or are incorporated into) the real. Henri Lefebvre, 1991 The Production of Space, 348. Introduction This paper proposes a Utopic Spatial Practice that seeks to rehabilitate utopianism in a digital age. Such a Utopic Spatial Practice might utilize the practices and technologies of locative media to more fully realise utopia as a specifically spatial form. It might also harness locative media’s potential as a dynamic mechanism for radical social transformation. These technologies plot media to geographical coordinates, so that,…
FCJ-139 Sand14: Reconstructing the Future of the Mobile Telecoms Industry
Laura Watts IT University of Copenhagen Which is farther from us, farther out of reach, more silent – the dead, or the unborn? Those whose bones lie under the thistles and the dirt and the tombstones of the Past, or those who slip weightless among molecules, dwelling where a century passes in a day, among the fair folk, under the great, bell-curved Hill of Possibility? — Ursula K. Le Guin, Towards an Archaeology of the Future Prologue I was researching how the future gets imagined and made in the mobile telecoms industry, and had been since 2003. But I stood in a cloud on a remote Scottish island, rain refusing to fall, only seep through waterproof layers to my skin. Laid out before me were the foundations of a Neolithic village, five thousand years old. Its remains were marked by upright, glistening flagstones and low-turf walls; a square hearth before…
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