[Air-L] Reading list on (media) politics of visibility/invisibility

Joshua Braun jabraun at journ.umass.edu
Thu Sep 8 06:35:49 PDT 2016 

I'd check out Fred Turner's essay in Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo 
Boczkowski and Kirsten Foot's edited volume, /Media Technologies./ He 
paints some fascinating contrasts between concerns about visibility, 
invisibility, and identity politics in the contemporary internet-driven 
media economy with earlier iterations.

Cheers,
Josh


On 09/08/2016 09:30 AM, MC Cambre wrote:
> This is a great initiative and I am happy to throw something in. My only
> flag is that it is an enormous set of fields, or zone at the intersection
> of a number of fields.
>
> *Some important contributions/interventions:*
>
>     - Invisibility and “the right to look” (Mirzoeff): [politics]
>     - Invisibility and “the distribution of the sensible” (First Levinas &
>     then Rancière) [philosophy]
>     - Barbara Maria Stafford's notion of an aesthetic of “the visible
>     invisible” [philosophy]
>     - Invisibility as a precondition for transparency. The condition of
>     sight (Merleau-Ponty) from "The Phenomenology of Perception" and of course
>     "The Visible and the Invisible"[philosophy]
>     - Hans Belting's work on the image [art history]
>     - Georges Didi-Huberman on the "visible, visual and virtual" [visual
>     studies]
>     - Rob Shields on "visualicity" [sociology]
>     - Elkins edited book on "visual literacy" has a lot of key essays from
>     Mitchell and Sherwin and others.[social sciences & art history]
>     - Tony Jappy's "Introduction to Visual Semiotics" in the Advances in
>     Semiotics series with Bloomsbury [methods & philosophy]
>     - My own book "The semiotics of Che Guevara: Affective Gateways" centres
>     on this visible/invisible dynaming, and is in the same Semiotics series
>     with Bloomsbury [methods & philosophy]
>     -
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 8:02 AM, Steffen Albrecht <steffen.albrecht at berlin.de
>> wrote:
>> Dear Daniel,
>>
>> Though it's been published some years ago, I'd highly recommend
>>
>> Brighenti, Andrea (2007): Visibility. A category for the social sciences.
>> In: Current Sociology 55(3), pp. 323-342
>>
>> with regard to the category
>>
>> ..."classical" approaches and authors that do NOT explicitly talk about
>> today's political (social) media contexts, but which you would consider
>> highly applicable to understand such phenomena.
>>
>> Best,
>> Steffen
>>
>> ----- ursprüngliche Nachricht ---------
>>
>> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Reading list on (media) politics of
>> visibility/invisibility
>> Date: Do 08 Sep 2016 13:09:34 CEST
>> From: Ansgar Koene<Ansgar.Koene at nottingham.ac.uk>
>> To: Daniel Kunzelmann<kunzelmann.daniel at yahoo.de>,
>> air-l at listserv.aoir.org<air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
>>
>> Hi Daniel,
>>     sounds like a really interesting topic to assemble a reading list for.
>> One article I recently read that could fit in the invisible category,
>> under 'influence of algorithms' would be
>> Zeynep Tufekci, “Algorithmic Harms beyond Facebook and Google: Emergent
>> Challenges of Computational Agency”, J. on Telecomm. & High Tech. L., 203,
>> 2015
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Ansgar
>>
>> Dr. Ansgar Koene
>> Senior Research Fellow: Horizon Policy Impact, CaSMa & UnBias
>> Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute
>> University of Nottingham
>> http://casma.wp.horizon.ac.uk/
>> http://unbias.wp.horizon.ac.uk/
>> http://www.horizon.ac.uk/
>> https://sites.google.com/site/arkoene/
>>
>> ________________________________________
>> From: Air-L [air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] on behalf of Daniel
>> Kunzelmann [kunzelmann.daniel at yahoo.de]
>> Sent: 08 September 2016 10:55
>> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
>> Subject: [Air-L] Reading list on (media) politics of
>> visibility/invisibility
>>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I felt like starting another list of literature :) Here is the
>> question/thesis at stake: We live in a hyper-mediated world, in which
>> the *speed and sheer amount of media posts *(Facebook, your favorite
>> newspapers, Twitter, blogs, you name it...) suggest that political
>> impact, relevance and importance is connected to "being visible" or
>> "making something visible". Vice versa, *if something is **not
>> visible**in today's social-media-democracy it does not exist, thus has
>> no meaning, thus has no political power/impact/relevance**.*
>>
>> Yet, I feel - and so far it's only really a feeling - that *these
>> invisible spaces and actions enable, generate and allocate as much
>> political power as their visible twins.* Against the backdrop of
>> "social-media-everywhere" and the *dominant daily narrative of the
>> visible* (which we all experience when we look at our smartphone), I'm
>> now looking for *authors and concepts that explore/reflect/challenge/*
>>
>> - that either the *politics of the visible*
>> - or the *politics of the invisible*
>> - or even the *relationship between visibility and invisibility* with
>> regards to political power.
>>
>> It might be *authors and concepts that already reflect on today's
>> (hyper) social media worlds**, as well as "classical" approaches on
>> visibility/invisibility of power.* To give you two examples:
>>
>> Thinking about today's social media, we could have a closer look at the
>> power of images (e.g. a meme) on our interfaces (visible) or at the
>> algorithmic structures that sort and "deliver" these images (invisible).
>> Both layers of power are real, in the sense that they affect us in our
>> daily live, but one is visible and one is invisible. And of course, they
>> are certainly connected.
>>
>> Same goes for something that existed before social media, let's say
>> party politics. There have always been official press releases and
>> interviews about how well e.g. a party congress went and what wonderful
>> values this party now stands for (transparency, inclusion, etc.), but at
>> the same time, at the congress in question, there also existed back-room
>> meetings and private phone calls to influence internal party currents
>> (opacity, exclusion, etc.). Again, both spaces and actions are real, in
>> the sense that they have power effects on the party's members and/or
>> possible voters, but one (media) space is visible and the other one
>> invisible. And, here too, both layers work together perfectly.
>>
>> So, anyone wants to share their must-read with me?
>>
>> *...on "new" Cultural and Social Anthropological approaches and authors
>> that already reflect on the politics of visibility/invisibility against
>> today's backdrop of "social-media-everywhere". **
>> **
>> **...and/or "classical" ***approaches and authors* that do NOT
>> explicitly talk about today's political (social) media contexts, but
>> which you would consider highly applicable to understand such phenomena.
>>
>> *Either directly drop your recommendations in here:
>> *https://danielderkunzelmann.piratenpad.de/airl-mediaoverloa
>> d-politics-visibility-invisibility*
>> or reply to this message via the list or a pm :)*
>> *
>> Of course, when the literature list is done, I will be sharing it with
>> all of you!
>>
>> kind regards,
>> Daniel
>>
>> *Daniel Kunzelmann,
>> Ph.D.c / Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich / Institute of Cultural
>> Anthropology/European Ethnology
>> twitter       @der_kunzelmann <https://twitter.com/der_kunzelmann>
>> blog            http://transformations-blog.com/daniel-kunzelmann/
>> web            http://unibas.academia.edu/DanielKunzelmann
>> linkedin     https://www.linkedin.com/pub/daniel-kunzelmann/7b/426/9a5*
>>
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>> ---- ursprüngliche Nachricht Ende ----
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>

-- 
Josh Braun, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Journalism Studies
Journalism Department
University of Massachusetts Amherst

@josh_braun
Skype: wideaperture
http://wideaperture.net/
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"Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more."
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