CFP: The Future of the Forum

The Future of the Forum: Internet Communities and the Public Interest

Saturday, December 5, 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley

Keynote Speakers:

Jim Buckmaster, CEO of craigslist

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Please send 300-word abstracts and a one-page C.V. to Professor Abigail De Kosnik at adekosnik@berkeley.edu by October 5, 2009.

Learn more about the Berkeley Center for New Media at http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/.

Jürgen Habermas’'s treatise on “the public sphere” locates the seeds of the French Revolution in the 18^th century rise of new media, newspapers and journals, in coffee houses and reading clubs, that facilitated the rapid exchange of ideas among educated citizens outside the state’s control. In contrast, Søren Kierkegaard attributed the inertia of the mid 18^th century to the public’s superficial engagement with media: “[T]he public comes into existence because all its participants become third parties….[T]his public gallery seeks some distraction, and soon gives itself over to the idea that everything which someone does, or achieves, has been done to provide the public something to gossip about….”

Internet forums – participatory and collaboratively authored online communities, discussion boards, blogs, and social networking sites – are rapidly changing the modes and norms of public communication. Will our new media age be a revolutionary one, similar to that analyzed by Habermas? Or will it be a period of widespread passivity, as Kierkegaard lamented of his own time?

This one-day symposium will explore the question, How are Internet communities re-configuring and re-constituting common conceptions of the public, the public good, the public interest, and civic responsibility? What new forms of dialogue are emerging with our new media? When do the pleasures of interacting with digital technologies coincide with, and facilitate, progressive social action?

Are the protocols of Internet affinity groups fragmenting the public into increasingly narrower niches, thus undermining opportunities for productive debates amongst individuals with diverse opinions? Or are contemporary Web users more often than not forging alliances and finding overlaps with strangers who are radically different from them in the “real world?”

The symposium will take place at the University of California, Berkeley. As a public university that has itself served as a medium for the emergence of new forms of public activism, UC Berkeley will provide an ideal setting for scholars to present pioneering research on new media and the public interest.

The symposium organizers invite proposals for papers addressing novel aspects of online participation, the formation of new publics, and the public good. Papers may be specific, focusing on case studies of particular Internet groups, or more theoretical and general in their approach.

Paper topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Historical analyses of how earlier forms of “new” media impacted the public sphere and the public interest (e.g., the printing press, the telephone, the radio, the cinema, ’zine culture).

• The impact of political blogs, “Tweets,” YouTube vids, MoveOn.org, candidate fan sites, “smart mob” technologies (Howard Rheingold), and other attempts to use new media for political organization, and their effects on “real-world” politics (e.g., the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, the 2009 “green revolution” in Iran).

• “Participatory cultures” (Henry Jenkins) such as Internet fan communities, Wikipedia pages, and YouTube, which lower the barriers to entering – thereby presumably democratizing – the field of cultural production.

• The concepts of “free” and/or “open” applying to a vast array of contemporary collectives/initiatives, not just to software development (e.g., open access journals, Christopher Kelty’s theory of “recursive publics” – self-governing communities that constantly make/modify/maintain their own infrastructure).

• Citizen journalism, participatory journalism, and other models for publishing news online that have eroded or re-invented traditional print news publishing models (e.g., Drudge Report, local community blogs, ad-free news Web sites).

• The establishment of alternate economies on the Internet, including reputation economies and “cycles of credit” (Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar), gift economies, and the attention economy. The intersection of these economies and issues of labor and leisure (e.g., creating popular online content for fame/praise rather than for compensation, eBay and Amazon.com sellers’ reputation linked to their income), and the question of whether the Internet is altering the structure of capitalism.

• Issues of reputation and representation. The importance of authorship, authority, and identity in Internet communities, the uncertainties of ascertaining who is “speaking” online, and whether open dialogue and trust between strangers is possible on the Internet (e.g., the anonymity of participation permitting flaming and censorship in Internet exchanges, plagiarism from online sources).

• New forms of public personae, public performance, and public broadcasting being founded via new media, and whether or how they provide the kind of entertainment-based “social glue” that mass broadcast media used to offer (e.g., “best-of-craigslist” posts, Yelp recommendations, Perez Hilton, Howcast.com).