Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
Date April 2007 / Category News
The MIT Media In Transition Conference (April 27-29) is focusing on "creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age." The use of contemporary media provokes an optimistic description of the user's agency and the participation in the culture industries. This bias makes several issues explicit: Amateur culture which accompanied the mass production of consumer goods for decades, takes place on a global scale. The culture industry is extended into user communities which co-construct products by changing, modifying and innovating. Besides an entire cultural production takes place beyond the conventional channels of production and development.
But the 'socialization of production means' does not necessarily change issues of ownership and control.
The concept of participatory culture recalls how debates on technology development were nourishing a technological imaginary of the consumer's "emergence from self imposed immaturity."
In my talk I revisit concepts of participation and relate user participation to the socio-technical ecosystem wherein the cultural production emerges. (read the abstract)
MIT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age. April 27-29, MIT.
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Date April 2007 / Category Lectures
With Bernhard Rieder: Hybrid Foam. Social Structure before Network and Community,
Paper presented at the BSA Annual Conference 2007, London, April 13 2007.
Date April 2007 / Category Lectures
Revisiting the case of interactive audiences and the user as producer. Paper presented at Media in Transition 5, MIT, Boston, MA, April 27 2007.
Date April 2007 / Category News
The 2007 BSA Conference evolves around the topic "Social Connections: Identities, Relationships, Technologies" (BSA). In collaboration with Bernhard Rieder, I'll present a paper on Hybrid Foam. Using Sloterdijk's metaphor of foam, we try to reflect social formations below the threshold of network and community. In Massively Multi-user Information Management Systems (MIMMS) such as Flickr and delicious we recognize social connections that are not sufficiently described with the metaphors of community, network or even the crowd (see abstract).
BSA Annual Conference 2007, Thursday, 12th - Saturday, 14th April 2007, University of East London.
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