[Sci-tech-public] CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS: Media in Transition 8: public media, private media (May 3-5, 2013 at MIT)

[Brad Seawell]

Sorry if you receive this more than once -

 

Media in Transition 8: public media, private media

International Conference

Conference dates: May 3-5, 2013 at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, MA.

Conference website: web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit8 (watch for updates).

CALL FOR PAPERS

Submissions accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 1, 2013
(evaluations begin in November). 
Please see the end of this call for papers for submission instructions. 

The distinction between public and private - where the line is drawn and how
it is sometimes inverted, 
the ways that it is embraced or contested - says much about a culture. Media
have been used to enable, 
define and police the shifting line between the two, so it is not surprising
that the history of media change 
to some extent maps the history of these domains. Media in Transition 8
takes up the question of the 
shifting nature of the public and private at a moment of unparalleled
connectivity, enabling new notions 
of the socially mediated public and unequalled levels of data extraction
thanks to the quiet demands of 
our Kindles, iPhones, televisions and computers.  While this forces us to
think in new ways about these 
long established categories, in fact the underlying concerns are rooted in
deep historical practice. MiT8 
considers the ways in which specific media challenge or reinforce certain
notions of the public or the 
private and especially the ways in which specific "texts" dramatize or
imagine the public, the private and 
the boundary between them.  It takes as its foci three broad domains:
personal identity, the civic (the 
public sphere) and intellectual property.         

Reality television and confessional journalism have done much to invert the
relations between private 
and public. But the borders have long been malleable. Historically, we know
that camera-armed Kodakers 
and telephone party lines threatened the status quo of the private; that the
media were complicit in 
keeping from the public FDR's disability and the foibles of the ruling
elite; and that paparazzi and 
celebrities are strategically intertwined in the game of publicity. How have
the various media played 
these roles (and represented them), and how is the issue changing at a
moment when most of our 
mediated transactions leave data traces that not only redefine the borders
of the private, but that 
serve as commodities in their own right? 

The public, too, is a contested space. Edmund Burke's late 18th century
invocation of the fourth 
estate linked information flow and political order, anticipating aspects of
Habermas's public sphere. 
>From this perspective, trends such as a siege on public service
broadcasting, a press in decline, 
and media fragmentation on the rise, all ring alarm bells. Yet WikiLeaks and
innovative civic uses 
of media suggest a sharp countertrend. What are the fault lines in this
struggle? How have they 
been represented in media texts, enacted through participants and given form
in media policy? 
And what are we to make of the fate of a public culture in a world whose
media representations 
are increasingly on-demand, personalized and algorithmically-designed to
please?

Finally, MiT8 is also concerned with the private-public rift that appears
most frequently in struggles 
over intellectual property (IP).  Ever-longer terms of IP protection
combined with a shift from media 
artifacts (like paper books) to services (like e-journals) threaten
long-standing practices such as book 
lending (libraries) and raise thorny questions about cultural access.
Social media sites, powered by users, 
often remain the private property of corporations, akin to the public
square's replacement by the mall, 
and once-public media texts, like certain photographic and film collections,
have been re-privatized by 
an array of institutions. These undulations in the private and public have
implications for our texts (remix 
culture), our access to them, and our activities as audiences; but they also
have a rich history of contestation, 
evidenced in the copybook and scrapbook, compilation film, popular song and
the open source and 
creative commons movement. 

MiT8 encourages a broad approach to these issues, with specific attention to
textual practice, users, 
policy and cultural implications.  As usual, we encourage work from across
media forms and across 
historical periods and cultural regions.  

Possible topics include: 

*	Media traces: cookies, GPS data, TiVo and Kindle tracking
*	The paradoxes of celebrity and the public persona
*	Representing the anxieties of the private in film, television,
literature
*	MMORPGs / identities / virtual publics 
*	The spatial turn in media: private consumption in public places
*	Historical media panics regarding the private-public divide
*	When cookies shape content, what happens to the public?
*	Creative commons and the new public sphere
*	Big data and privacy
*	Party lines and two-way radio: amplifying the private
*	The fate of public libraries in the era of digital services
*	Methodologies of internet and privacy studies
*	Creative commons, free software, and the new public sphere
*	Public and civic WiFi access to the internet
*	Surveillance, monitoring and their (dis)contents

 

Submit an Abstract and Short Bio

Short abstracts for papers should be about 250 words in a PDF or Word format
and should 
be sent as email attachments to mit8 at mit.edu no later than Friday, March 1,
2013. Please 
include a short (75 words or fewer) biographical statement. 


We will be evaluating submissions on a rolling basis beginning in November
and will respond 
to every proposal. 


Include a Short Bibliography

For this year's conference, we recommend that you include a brief
bibliography of no more 
than one page in length with your abstract and bio. 


Proposals for Full Panels

Proposals for full panels of three or four speakers should include a panel
title and separate 
abstracts and bios for each speaker. Anyone proposing a full panel should
recruit a moderator. 


Submit a Full Paper

In order to be considered for inclusion in a conference anthology, you must
submit a full version 
of your paper prior to the beginning of the conference. 


If you have any questions about the eighth Media in Transition conference,
please contact Brad Seawell at seawell at mit.edu.

 

 

 

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Brad Seawell, Program Coordinator

MIT Communications Forum

617.253.3521

 

 

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