[Air-L] Update CfP - Conference on Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space

[Anne Helmond]

Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space

June 18-20, 2014 - University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (funded by the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Science)

Organizers: José van Dijck & Thomas Poell

Confirmed keynote speakers: Lance Bennett, Tarleton Gillespie, Alfred
Hermida, Hallvard Moe

Discussants: C.W. Anderson, Marcel Broersma, Jean Burgess, Irene Costera
Meijer, Mark Deuze, Marlies Glasius, Eggo Müller, Bernhard Rieder, and
Michael Schudson

The quick rise of social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and
LinkedIn, is fundamentally affecting the balance between personal (private)
space, community (public) space, and corporate (commercial) space. These
platforms allow, on the one hand, for mass participation in public
discourse, providing users with new means of expressions and connection. In
this light, it has been argued that social media bring about a
democratization of public life: facilitating novel forms of political
contestation, more participatory types of journalism, and direct
interaction between citizens and political and cultural elites. On the
other hand, social media, through their technological architectures, steer
how users interact with each other. They penetrate the dynamics of everyday
life, reshaping people's informal personal interactions, but also affecting
institutional structures and professional routines. In this process, both
public and private communication becomes entangled with social media's
commercial mechanisms, transforming the political economy of the media
landscape. In combination, these developments force all societal
actors--including the mass media, civil society organizations, and state
institutions--to  reconsider and recalibrate their position in public space.

This conference explores the potentially contradictory cultural and
techno-commercial mechanisms introduced by the rise of social media
platforms. The organizers invite research from different perspectives and
traditions to reflect on this issue. First, we invite work that
interrogates how both formal institutions (news, public broadcasting, law
and order, etc) and informal organizations (activists, communities) adopt
and adjust to social media. What new cultural and political practices are
articulated in these processes? Second, we encourage technological
perspectives: presentations of scholarship examining which mechanisms of
selection and which logics of knowledge production are embedded in the
platforms' technologies. Third, the conference solicits economic and
political perspectives: how do social media affect the operations and
economies of media production? And how do these technologies affect power
relations between different social actors?

The main question driving this conference is how social media, looked at
from different angles and scholarly approaches, are transforming concepts
of public space or "publicness". More particularly, we will ask how social
media are involved in the transformation of particular domains, including
news production, public broadcasting, activism, and law and order. Examples
of possible topics follow below.

Public space
-          Social media and new practices of identity and citizenship
-          Social platforms and shifting norms and logics of knowledge
-          Fluctuating dynamics of public debate
-          Redistribution of political, economic, and cultural power
through social media
-          Facebook and the reconceptualization of publicness

News
-          Crowdsourcing journalism
-          Algorithmic selection and circulation of news
-          User-generated content as news source
-          Business models for online news
-          Social media and data journalism

Public broadcasting
-          YouTube's role in public broadcasting
-          Twitter as a real-time rating service
-          The participation paradigm in television
-          PSB 'public' values and the use of social media
-          "Social TV": the integration of social media and television.

Activism
-          Leadership and the online organization of protest
-          Connective processes of mobilization
-          Social technologies and changing repertoires of contention
-          Viral protest videos
-          Real-time protest communication
-          Twitter and alternative journalism

Law and order
-          Challenges of viral mobilization
-          Security and surveillance versus accountability
-          Data collection and new methods of surveillance
-          "Policing" social media platforms
-          Crowdsourcing civilian prosecutors

Submit an Abstract
-          Presentations of original research will be 10-15 minutes long
and will be held in panels; panels have 4 speakers max. and will last an
hour and a half. We invite 400-word abstracts, and select presentations on
the basis of their quality. Each proposal should contain a 100-word bio of
the presenter.
-          Proposals for full panels of four speakers are also welcome;
they should include a description of the panel in approximately 400 words,
and short (100 word) abstracts and bios for each speaker. A proposal for a
full panel ideally also includes a moderator.
-          Papers: We aim to publish a selection of the best papers on the
theme of the conference in a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal or as
a book collection. Papers should be max 7,500 words (including references).
Full papers are due after the conference. Please indicate in the abstract
of your presentation or panel whether you plan to submit a full paper!
-          Proposals for presentations or full panels should be sent in a
PDF or Word format as email attachments to asmc14-fgw at uva.nl no later than
Friday, March 7, 2014. We will evaluate submissions on a rolling basis and
will respond to every proposal.
-          The fee for registration will be 50 euro to cover all conference
documentation, refreshments, lunches and administration costs. Registration
will open in March 2014.

Website:
http://acgs.uva.nl/news-and-events/upcoming-events/item/social-media-and-the-transformation-of-public-space.html