[Air-L] Track at Italian STS conference - INTERNET AND NEW PRODUCTIVE PARADIGMS

Stefano De Paoli stefano.depaoli at gmail.com
Sun Feb 19 23:05:42 PST 2012


Hello list,

this is just a reminder.....


with 2 colleagues I am running a track at forthcoming Italian STS
conference "EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, SOCIAL WORLDS"  this June 21-23,
2012, in Rovigo.

The CfP of our track might be of interest for some people in this list.
Feel free to submit an abstract. :-)

Abstracts (in Italian or English) should be sent as email attachment
(as MS word or Rich Text
Format) to the track’s coordinators (and carbon copied to
4convegnosts at gmail.com) by March 1,
2012. Abstracts with a maximum length of 500 words should contain the
title, author's name,
affiliation and contact details including e-mail. Further information
on the conference on:
www.stsitalia.org


TRACK: INTERNET AND NEW PRODUCTIVE PARADIGMS: THE STS CONTRIBUTION
Convernors:
Stefano De Paoli (Fondazione <ahref, Trento, stefano at ahref.eu)
Cristiano Storni (University of Limerick, cristiano.storni at ul.ie)
Maurizio Teli (Fondazione <ahref, Trento, maurizio at ahref.eu)
The exponential diffusion of the Internet on a global scale shows the
emergence of new and
socio-technical arrangements that seem to call into question our
traditional separation between
production and consumption. For many, we are witnessing the emergence
and consolidation of a
completely new production paradigm where production processes are
decentralised, distributed
among an undisclosed mass of actors often proactive, sometimes without
a predictable path. The
examples of this grow daily: Wikipedia, free and open source software
and hardware,
folksonomies, crowdsourcing platforms, online hacktivism,
Do-it-Yourself communities, and so on.
New concepts have been developed in an attempt to capture these new
practices and these
new socio-technical arrangements: in the late 1970s, Toffler (1980)
theorized the emergence of the
prosumer, both producer and consumer of goods. This phenomenon of
convergence between the
producer and consumer has stimulated research to generate new concepts
such as "wikinomics
(Tapscott and Williams, 2006)," commons-based peer production
"(Benkler, 2006)," produsage
"(Bruns, 2008), and ideas like the Hack-tivism (Auty, 2004) or
Mash-ups technology (Hartmann et
al. 2006). At the same time, however, we are witnessing the emergence
of criticisms that highlight
that these innovative aspects are the perpetuation, more or less
obvious, of the traditional capitalist
logic. This  seems to fuel disputes around the themese of control,
surveillance, exploitation of
intellectual property management, deskilling, etc. (Lash,  2002,
Terranova, 2000, De Paoli and
Storni, 2011)
Instead of taking the emergence of the new production paradigm as a
matter of fact, the goal of
this track is to describe and understand the practices and dynamics
that characterize the sociotechnical collectives behind the phenomena
mentioned above, and discuss how they help us to
rethink not only the traditional division of labour between production
and consumption, but mostly
what we mean with the terms work, production, consumption, and
property (commons) in our
information society.
In this sense to invite contributions and case studies in different
areas to discuss, but are not
limited to:
- the role of STS in the study of new emerging practices in the
information society;
- how to rethink and/or deconstruct empirically the concepts of production,
consumption, property, work and good: debates, controversies and new
definitions;
- doing and undoing the boundaries between production and consumption
(or design
and use);
- new conceptions of labor and its distribution;
- Do-it-Yourself and Do-it-with-Others: new practices?

References
Auty, C., 2004, “Political Hacktivism: tool of the underdog or scourge
of cyberspace?” in  Aslib proc: new
information perspectives, Vol. 56, No. 4, pp. 212-22
Benkler, Y, 2006, The wealth of Networks: how social production
transform markets and freedom.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Bruns, A., 2008, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From
production to produsage. New
York: Peter Lang.
De Paoli S. and Storni C, 2011, “Produsage in hybrid networks:
sociotechnical skills in the case of Arduino”.
New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 17(1), 31-52.
Hartmann, B. et al., 2006,  Hacking, Mashing, Gluing: A Study of
Opportunistic Design and Development,
Technical Report, Stanford University Computer Science Department.
Lash, Scott. 2002. Critique of Information. London: Sage
Tapscott, D. and Williams, A. 2006, Wikinomics: how mass collaboration
changes everything. New York:
Portfolio.
Toffler, A., 1980, The Third Wave. New York: Morrow.



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