The 5^th ICTs and Society-Conference: The Internet and Social Media at a Crossroads: Capitalism or Commonism? Perspectives for Critical Political Economy and Critical Theory.

https://icts-and-society.net/events/5th-icts-and-society-conference/

FULL PROGRAMME

Images from the conference

Supported by tripleC: Open Access Journal for Communication, Capitalism & Critique

Part of the ISIS Summit Vienna 2015: Information Society at the Crossroads: Response and Responsibility of the Sciences of Information.
Vienna University of Technology.
Vienna, Austria
June 3-7, 2015.
http://summit.is4is.org

The information society has come with the promise  to restore information as a commons. The promise has not yet proven true. Instead, we face trends towards the commercialisation and commoditisation of all information; towards the totalisation of surveillance and the extension of the battlefield to civil society through information warfare; towards disinfotainment overflow; towards a collapse of the technological civilisation itself.

The Vienna Summit was a multi-conference and at the same time the 5^th ICTs and Society-Conference: The Internet and Social Media at a Crossroads: Capitalism or Commonism? Perspectives for Critical Political Economy and Critical Theory.

Given that the information society and the study of information face a world of crisis today and are at a crossroads, also the future of the Internet and social media are in question. The 5^th ICTs and Society Conference therefore wants to focus on the questions: What are the main challenges that the Internet and social media are facing in capitalism today? What potentials for an alternative, commonist Internet are there? What are existing hindrances for such an Internet? What is the relationship of power structures, protest movements, societal developments, struggles, radical reforms, etc. to the Internet? How can critical political economy and critical theory best study the Internet and social media today?

Selected Presentation Files (provided by the presenters)

Domenico Fiormonte, Desmond Schmidt, Paolo Monella, Paolo Sordi:
The Politics of Code Presentation

John Casey and Wolfgang Greller: Jane Austen and the Belly of the Beast Part 2: Language and Power Presentation

Tim Dwyer and Fiona Martin: How Did They Get There? The Likeable Engine, Dark Referrals and the Problematic of Social Media News Analytics  Presentation

Banu Durdağ: Creating Alternative Communication Spaces: Resistance, Technology and Social Change Presentation   Extended Abstract

Hakan Yüksel: Creating Dependency instead of Prosperity: A Critique of Information Society Policies in Turkey Presentation   Extended Abstract

Josef Baum
: Towards a Global Ad Tax – Advertisment in a Political Economy and Political Ecology Framework Presentation

Sašo Slaček Brlek and Jernej Amon Prodnik: Quantification of Audiences as a Decision-Making Factor in Slovene Web Journalism  Presentation

Gareth Johnson: A Critical Examination of Barriers to Open Access in UK Academia  Presentation

Conference Sessions and Programme

THURSDAY, JUNE 4

Thursday June 4
11:00-13:00, Location: Freihaus, FH6
ICT&S1: The Critical Approach to ICTs and Society: Keynote Talks by Christian Fuchs, Jörg Becker
Chair: Sebastian Sevignani
Christian Fuchs: Critical Theory of the Internet: The Importance of Raymond Williams, Dallas Smythe, and Herbert Marcuse Today
Jörg Becker
: Media and Information Technology: Social Control from Above & Below and From Outside & Inside

Thursday June 4
14:00-15:30, Location: Freihaus, FH2
ICT&S2: General Intellect as a Limit to Capital?
Chair: Marisol Sandoval
Christian Fuchs : Marx, the General Intellect, the Grundrisse, and the Fragment on Machines in the Age of Digital Labour and Digital Capitalism
Sebastian Sevignani: Capital Control, Privacy Crisis, and the Work of Being Watched
Tilman Reitz: The Class Situation(s) of Knowledge Work
Arwid Lund
: The Capital of Communism: Critical Evaluations of Peer Production’s Strategic Alliance with Capital

Thursday June 4
16:00-17:30, Location: Freihaus, FH2
ICT&S3A: The Political Economy of Digital Labour
Chair: Christian Fuchs
Mariano Zukerfeld : Informational Cognitive Exploitation, Digital Labour and the Double Freedom of Knowledge
Guillermina Yansen, Agostina Dolcemáscolo, Andrés Rabosto: Cognitive Exploitation of Audiovisual Content: The Youtube and XVideos Cases
Hangwoo Lee Lee: Compensating for Free Digital Labor: DRM, Micropayment, and Basic Income
Isabell C Loeschner
: Enterprise Social Media Under the Pretext of Voluntariness – An Unexplored Dimension of Digital Labour

Thursday June 4
16:00-17:30, Location: Freihaus, FH3
ICT&S3B: The Information Revolution’s Impact on Society: Information Economy, Digital Politics, Electronic Culture
Chair: Marisol Sandoval
Andrzej Piotr Wierzbicki: The Future of Work in the Information Society
Domenico Fiormonte, Desmond Schmidt, Paolo Monella, Paolo Sordi: The Politics of Code. How Digital Representations and Languages Shape Culture
Helen Barcham: These Wars are Personal: Feminism and Therapy Culture
Tales Tomaz
: History of Being, Machenschaft and Anti-Semitism: Implications of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” for a Critical Theory of Technology

Thursday June 4
18:00-19:30, Location: Freihaus, FH2
ICT&S4A: Cultural Studies and the Internet
Chair: Sebastian Sevignani
Dimitra L. Milioni: Opening the ‘Black Box’ of User Agency: A Critical Cultural Studies Approach to Web 2.0
Seija Ridell, Minna Saariketo
: Negotiating the Architectural Power of Connective Media. Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model and the Critical Study of Digitally Afforded Social Environments
Carsten Winter, Lorenz Grünewald: New Perspectives for Use-Values? For a more Complex Understanding of Digital Labour
Bernardo Barros Coelho de Oliveira: Experience and Narrative in the Digital Era: the Binge-Viewing Case

Thursday June 4
18:00-19:30, Location: Freihaus, FH3
ICT&S4B: Open Education and Critical Media Literacy in Digital Capitalism
Chair: Marisol Sandoval
Julie Danielle Frechette: Top Ten Guiding Questions for Critical Digital Media Literacy Education
Ronald Macintyre: An Uneasy Relationship: Open Educational Practice and Neoliberalism
John Casey, Wolfgang Greller
: Jane Austen and the Belly of the Beast Part 2 Language and Power: Commodification, Technology and the Open Agenda in Higher Education

FRIDAY, JUNE 5

Friday June 5
11:00-12:30, Location: Freihaus, FH2
ICT&S5: An Alternative Internet!? Prosumer Co-operatives, the Digital Commons and Alternative Online Spaces
Chair: Yuqi Na
Andreas Wittel: Digital Technologies and Labour in Capitalism and in the Commons
Marisol Sandoval: Prosumer Co-operatives and the Prospects of Truly Social Media
Banu Durdağ: Creating Alternative Communication Spaces: Resistance, Technology and Social Change
Hans Asenbaum: Revisiting E-topia – A Social Movements Perspective on Cyberdemocracy

Friday June 5
14:00-15:30, Location: Freihaus, FH2
ICT&S6: Neoliberal and Socialist Perspectives on the Information Society and Information Technology
Chair: Jernej Amon Prodnik
Alistair S. Duff: ‘MereBrotherhood’: Religious Socialism @ Network Society
David J. Hakken, Maurizio Teli, Barbara Andrews: Critical Alternatives in Computing Scholarship: Coordinates of a Struggle to Go Beyond Capital
Yuqi Na: Ideologies of the Development of the Chinese Internet
Hakan Yüksel: Creating Dependency instead of Prosperity: A Critique of Information Society Policies in Turkey

Friday June 5
16:00-17:30, Location: Freihaus, FH2
ICT&S7A: The Political Economy of Online Advertising
Chair: Christian Fuchs,
Josef Baum
: Towards a Global Ad Tax – Advertisment in a Political Economy and Political Ecology Framework
Secil Toro: Deception and Internet Advertising: Tactics Used in Online Shopping Sites
Bahar Ayaz: Culture Industry in the Digital Era
Sašo Slaček Brlek, Jernej Amon Prodnik: Quantification of Audiences as a Decision-Making Factor in Slovene Web Journalism

Friday June 5
16:00-17:30, Location: Freihaus, FH3
ICT&S7B: The Internet and Power
Chair: Marisol Sandoval
Justine Gangneux
: Surveillance Enabling Technologies and Peer Scrutiny: Impacts on Trust in Young Adults’ Interpersonal Relationships
Laura Fichtner: Techno-Politics as Network(ed) Struggles
Kavous Ardalan:  Media and Democracy: Four Paradigmatic Views
Teresa Numerico: Google AI and Turing’s Social Definition of Intelligence

SATURDAY, JUNE 6
Saturday June 6
09:00-11:00, Location: Freihaus, FH6
ICT&S8: How Smart is Big Data?
 Keynote talks by Stefania Milan and Payal Arora
Chair: Christian Fuchs
Stefania Milan: Big Data and the Understanding of the Political
Payal Arora: Big Data Commons and the Global South

Saturday June 6
14:00-15:30, Location: Freihaus, FH2
ICT&S9A: Commodification in the Digital Age
Chair: Christian Fuchs
Tim Dwyer, Fiona Martin
: How Did They Get Here? The Likeable Engine, Dark Referrals and the Problematic of Social Media News Analytics
Rachel O’Dwyer: When Telcos Become Banks: Sociotechnical Control in Mobile Money
Demetra Garbasevschi: Personal Identity as Digital Commodity
Zafer Kıyan: Rethinking Cultural Production in the Context of Commodification: Two Step or Dual Production

Saturday June 6
14:00-15:30, Location: Freihaus, FH3
ICT&S9B: The Internet and Social Movements
Chair: Yuqi Na
Aylin Aydogan, Funda Basaran: Wherever The Resistance, Video Activism Is There: Çapul TV
Bianca Mitu: Social Classes and Digital Activism
Guiomar Rovira: Twenty Years of Networks, Streets and Struggles
Paloma Viejo Otero:
 How Do Far-Right Movements and Parties Use the Internet and the Social Media? Digital Facebook Postcards With Hate From the Far Right

Saturday June 6
16:00-17:30, Location: Freihaus, FH2
ICT&S10: The Information Commons: Commodification and Commonification
Chair: Andreas Wittel
Gareth James Johnson: A Critical Examination of Barriers to Open Access in UK Academia
Wilhelm Peekhaus
: Librarians and University Presses of the World Unite!: Efforts to Resuscitate the Knowledge Commons of Academic Publishing
Gregory Taylor: Dallas Smythe and the Spectrum Commons
Joseph E. Brenner: A Fresh Look: The Social Competence of Information Science

Saturday June 6
18:00-19:30, Location: Freihaus, FH2
ICT&S11: The Internet, Technology and Critical Theories
Chair: Sebastian Sevignani
László Ropolyi: Emerging Web-Life – A Marxian Perspective
Magdalena Kania-Lundholm
: What the Critical Approach Can Bring to the Study of a Potentially Vulnerable Group’s Everyday ICT Usage
Emma Keltie, Peter Bansel: The Online Production and Commodification of Gender Variant and Sexuality Diverse Young People
Sahana Udupa: ‘Faith Politics’: Social Media and Right-Wing Hindu Nationalism in India

Original Call for Papers:

Presentations and submissions are organised in the form of 23 panel topics (ICT&S1-ICT&S23; please indicate the panel identification number to which you submit in your submisison):

* ICT&S1 The Internet and Critical Theory:
What does it mean to study the Internet, social media and society today in a critical way? What are Critical Internet Studies, Critical Political Economy and Critical Theories of Social Media?

* ICT&S2 The Internet, Karl Marx, and Marxist Theory:
How can classical forms of critical theory and critical political economy e.g. the works of e.g. Karl Marx, the Frankfurt School, Critical Political Economy of the Media and Communication, Critical and Marxist Cultural Studies, Socialist Feminism, Theories of Imperialism, Raymond Williams cultural materialism, etc be used for understanding the Internet and social media today?

* ICT&S3 The Internet, Commodities and Capitalism:
What is the role of the Internet and social media in the context of the commodity logic in contemporary capitalism?

* ICT&S4 The Political Economy of Online Advertising
How can we best critically understand, analyse and combat the role of advertising on the Internet and the role of online advertising in capitalism? What are the problems of online advertising culture? How would a world without advertising and an advertising-free Internet look like?

* ICT&S5 The Internet and Power:
How do power structures, exploitation, domination, class, digital labour, commodification of the communication commons, ideology, and audience/user commodification, and surveillance shape the Internet and social media? What is the relationship of exploitation and domination on the Internet?

* ICT&S6 Raymond Williams’ Cultural Materialism and the Internet:
How can we use theoretical insights from Raymond Williams’ cultural materialism for critically understanding the Internet and social media today?

* ICT&S7 Dallas Smythe and the Internet:
How can we use insights from Dallas Smythe’s political economy of communication for critically understanding the Internet and social media today?

* ICT&S8 Critical Cultural Studies Today: Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart and the Internet:
What is the legacy of Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart’s versions of cultural studies for critically understanding the Internet? What kind of cultural studies do we need in the 21^st century? And what is in this context the relationship of culture and capitalism and the relationship of critical cultural studies to Marxist theory?

* ICT&S9 The Frankfurt School and the Internet:
How can insights of various generations of the Frankfurt School be used for critically theorising the Internet? What are commonalities and differences between a Frankfurt School approach and other forms of critical theory for understanding the Internet?

* ICT&S10 Marxist Semiotics, Marxist Linguistics, Critical Psychology, Marxism and the Internet:
How can Marxist semiotics and Marxist theories of language, information, psychology and communication (e.g. Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Valentin Voloshinov, Klaus Holzkamp, Georg Klaus, Lev Vygotsky, Aleksei Leontiev, Mikhail Bakhtin, etc.) be used today for critically understanding the Internet?

* ICT&S11 The Internet and Global Capitalism:
What is the role of the Internet and social media in contemporary global capitalism? What is the role of developing countries, especially Africa, and emerging economies such as China and India in the world of the Internet and social media?

* ICT&S12 The Internet and Neoliberalism with Chinese Characteristics:
Chinese WWW platforms such as Baidu, Taobao, Qq, Sina, Weibo, etc. are besides Californian platforms the most prominent ones on the web. What is the role of social media in Chinese capitalism? What is the role of the Internet in networked working class struggles in China?

* ICT&S13 The Political Economy of Digital Labour:
What is digital labour and how do exploitation and surplus-value generation work on the Internet? Which forms of exploitation and class structuration do we find on the Internet, how do they work, what are their commonalities and differences? How does the relation between toil and play change in a digital world? How do classes and class struggles look like in 21^st century informational capitalism?

* ICT&S14 The Political Economy of the Internet and the Capitalist State Today:
How does the relationship of capitalism, state power, and the Internet look like today? What is the role of state surveillance and surveillance ideologies in policing the crisis of capitalism? How does the relationship of the Internet and state power’s various forms of regulation, control, repression, violence and surveillance look like and what is the influence of capitalism on state power and vice versa in the context of the Internet?

* ICT&S15 Ideology Critique 2.0: Ideologies of and on the Internet:
What are ideologies of and on the Internet, web 2.0, and social media, how do they work, and how can they be deconstructed and criticised?

* ICT&S16 Hegel 2.0: Dialectical Philosophy and the Internet:
What contradictions, conflicts, ambiguities, and dialectics shape 21st century information society and social media? How can we use Hegel and Marxist interpretations of Hegel for critically understanding Internet dialectics?

* ICT&S17 Capitalism and Open Access Publishing:
What changes has academic publishing been undergoing in contemporary capitalism? What are the potentials of academic open access publishing for the re-organisation of the publishing world ? What problems do non-commercial open access publishing face in capitalism and capitalist academia? How can these problems be overcome? What are the problems of capitalist forms of open access publishing? What progressive political measures and demands should be made in order to foster non-commercial open access publishing?

* ICT&S18 Class Struggles, Social Struggles and the Internet:
What is the role of counter-power, resistance, struggles, social movements, civil society, rebellions, uproars, riots, revolutions, and political transformations in 21st century information society and how (if at all) are they connected to social media? What struggles are needed in order to establish a commonist Internet and a 21^st century democratic-commonist society? How can we use critical theory for interpreting phenomena such as online leaking, Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks, Wikipedia, federated social networks, Anonymous, hacktivism, Pirate Parties, privacy advocates, the free/libre/open source (FLOSS) movement, the open source, open hardware and open content movement, etc., and what is the relationships of such political expressions to capitalism, anti-capitalism, liberalism, and socialism?

* ICT&S19 Critical/Radical Internet Studies, the University and Academia Today:
What are the challenges and problems for teaching and conducting research about the Internet from a critical and radical perspective? What can be done to overcome existing limits and problems?

* ICT&S20 The Internet and the Left:
How could a 21^st century Left best look like and what is the role of the Internet for such a Left? What is the historical, contemporary, and possible future relationship of Critical Internet Studies and the Left? What is the role of the Internet in left-wing movements? What problems do such movements face in relation to the media, communications, the Internet, and social media?

* ICT&S21 Anti-Capitalist Feminism and the Internet Today:
What is the role of and relationship of identity politics and anti-capitalism for feminist studies of the Internet today? How can we best study capitalist patriarchy in the context of the Internet and social media?

* ICT&S22 The Internet, Right-Wing Extremism and Fascism Today:
How do far-right movements and parties use the Internet and social media? How should a left-wing anti-fascist strategy that combats online right-wing extremism look like?

* ICT&S23 An Alternative Internet:
What is a commonist/communist Internet? What is an alternative Internet? What are alternative social media? How do they relate to the commons and commonism as a 21^st century form of communism? Which problems do alternative Internet platforms face? What needs to be done in order to overcome these problems?

Online SUBMISSION:
https://sciforum.net/conference/isis-summit-vienna-2015/icts
https://sciforum.net/conference/isis-summit-vienna-2015/page/instructions
Please submit an extended abstract of 750-2000 words:
First register and then select the conference “ISIS Summit Vienna 2015” and the conference stream “ICTS 2015”
Only one submission per person will be considered
Please indicate the number/ID of the panel to which you are submitting at the start of your abstract (ICTSxx). Submissions without panel identifier or that fall outside the topics covered by the 23 panels will not be further considered.

Submission deadline:
February 27, 2015

Registration Fee:
120 Euros (early bird registration in the ICTs and Society conference stream, registration no later than April 3, 2015)

Accomodation
The conferencet takes place around around the time of a bank holiday that many tourists use for visiting Vienna for an extended weekend. The organisers therefore recommend early booking of accomodation. Discounted options for conference participants can be found on http://summit.is4is.org/registration/accommodation