• Thursday, October 9: Siva Vaidhyanathan
• Friday, October 10: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
• Saturday, October 11: Megan Boler

Siva Vaidhyanathan (bio)
Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Virginia

Thursday, October 8, 2009
1:00p-2:30p
Crystal Ballroom, 5th floor

As Google engulfs more essential features of our daily lives, some important questions about the company’s future and our future with it arise: can Google remain as good as it professes to be? And can we learn to use its power well, to enhance and enrich our lives rather than merely to connect us with more goods and services in record time? Outlining and questioning what I call the “theology” of Google is the goal of this talk and the book out of which it comes. As I observed all the ways that we have invited Google into our lives and Google has invited us into its business, I grew concerned with the bind faith that we were placing in a company that, at the time of this writing, has been around for just over 10 years. As with many theological systems, the moral principles are less important than the operational foundations – the ideologies at work that help shape the world-view of those who participate in it. And, as with many theological systems, patrons express their faith in many forms and at various levels. For true believers, looking out at the world in the early years of the 20th century, seeking wisdom and guidance, Google looks like the model for everything and the solution to every problem. For most people, Google just seems really helpful and benevolent. For some would-be reformers, particular practices of the company demand scrutiny within the faith. For apostates, Google has fallen from its heights of moral authority. Google’s ideological roots are well documented. Google’s founders and early employees believe deeply in the power of information technology to transform our consciousness (collectively and individually). Less well understood are the theories that inform how Google interacts with us and how we interact with Google. Increasingly, Google is the lens through which we view the world. Google refracts more than reflects what we think is true and important. It filters and focuses our queries and explorations through the world of digitized information. It ranks and links so quickly and succinctly, reducing the boiling tempest of human expression into a clean and navigable list, that it generates for us the comforting and perhaps necessary illusion of both comprehension and precision. Its process of collecting, ranking, linking, and displaying knowledge informs what we consider to be good, true, valuable, and relevant. The stakes could not be higher.

Discussant: Ken Hillis (bio)

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (bio)
Associate Professor
Department of Modern Culture and Media
Brown University

Friday, October 9, 2009
1:00p-2:30p
Crystal Ballroom, 5th floor

That we live in a networked society has become a cliché. From high- speed financial networks that erode national sovereignty to networking sites like facebook.com that transform the meaning of the word “friend”; from blogs devoted to conspiracy theories to viruses that threaten global catastrophe, networks are not only the content of society, but also allegedly its structure and message. To exaggerate slightly, the answer to all questions as to what’s new-politically, culturally, militarily-about our current era reduce to: it’s the network. But what are networks and how do they matter? How do they differ from one another? How are they experienced and negotiated-what feelings of paranoia, empowerment, and inclusion/exclusion do they engender? How, in other words, are they imagined technologically and socially?

This talk addresses the question of “imagined networks” through the various theoretical and political crises surrounding the Internet and global telecommunications more broadly-from the always impending Electronic Pearl Harbor to dirty, never-ending databases that are a scholar’s dream and nightmare-in order to address the centrality of crises to our ability to know Internet “in theory.” It asks: to what extent is the Internet a crisis machine? And to what extent are crises central to our ability to link our everyday experiences to its larger, invisible, operations?

Discussant: Jenny Sundén (bio)

Megan Boler (bio)
Professor
Department of Theory & Policy Studies
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto

Saturday, October 10, 2009
1:00p-2:30p
Crystal Ballroom, 5th floor

Truth claims, while always fraught, became even murkier in the years following September 11, 2001. My three-year mixed methods research project “Rethinking Media, Democracy and Citizenship” examined the motivations of producers of ‘digital dissent’ following mainstream media news coverage of events including the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the 2004 presidential election. Our interviews with 35 participants and survey of 160 online video, blog, and satire producers representing diverse political views, evidence frustration with and desire to correct media coverage, as well as influence political views. Within the spectacles of weapons of mass destruction and Mission Accomplished, this era best described by Colbert’s “truthiness” (“what feels true, not based on reason; and, what feels true to me”) coincides with increased access to digital media and proliferation of user-generated tactical interventions (blogs, videos, remix). Yet an affective longing for certainty and truth is in tension with the postmodern awareness that ‘all truths are constructed’. With video clips highlighting remix and crises of truth, I illustrate how prosumers energize new forms of creative politics, and how they describe “paths to truth” and “sense making” in an epoch governed by truthiness. However, drawing on the work of Ranciere, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard I argue that we need to recast truth as ontology (an account of how things come into being) alongside questions of epistemology (what counts as truth). I suggest a new ontology that traces ‘truth’ as relations of productive force and strategies that make audible and visible the voices and claims, such as those of dissent and activism, often dismissed as invisible noise.

Discussant: Caroline Bassett (bio)