[Air-L] Call for (ICA) panelists: dead and dying platforms

[Muira McCammon]

Hi, all,

I'm organizing and proposing a panel submission to ICA 2020 in Australia
for the Communication History division on the topic of "dead and dying
platforms" with a special focus on the ethical, technological, and
theoretical challenges that come with studying them.

This panel aims to grapple with some of the following questions:

What are dead and dying platforms? What are their futures, their pasts?
What forces and factors kill a platform, and what actors and architectures
help bring a platform back to life?
What might a political economy of dead and dying platforms look like?
What laws, economic forces, and social trends might we consider in the
historical analysis of platforms that have survived?
What narratives and counter-narratives of dead platforms have surfaced, and
how can we tease out commonalities between them?
Where does data on dead platforms go?
What role do web archives play in helping us remember and forget dead
platforms and their users?
What memory narratives do users invoke, as they reflect on the affordances
of former platform?
What can we learn from comparative analyses
<https://twitter.com/castrojade/status/821428461747085312> of platform
death?
What does platform death provoke online and offline? And, what is
gained/lost by framing a platform's end as a "death" ?
What does it mean to "update" a platform?
What memory narratives have developed around platforms' (former)
affordances?
What emotions surround a platform's life and death?
Has platform death prompted certain kinds of resistance?

Our interpretation of this term ("platform death") is broad. Maybe you've
been sitting on a paper on Vine
<https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-twitter-shutdown>,
Backpage
<https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/backpage-sex-workers-fosta-sesta-switter-tryst-trafficking.html>,
FireEagle <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Eagle>, Google Reader
<https://www.cnet.com/news/google-reader-is-done-here-are-five-alternatives/>,
StumbleUpon
<https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/24/17389230/stumbleupon-shut-down-internet-discovery>,
AIM <https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/15/aim-is-officially-dead/>, or Rdio
<https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/17/9750890/rdio-shutdown-pandora> and are
looking for a home for it? Maybe you're obsessed with a platform that was
designed millions of miles away from Silicon Valley that lived a short life
or is currently on the verge of death? Maybe you have been searching for an
opportunity to dig into web archives from years and years ago? Maybe, like
me, you missed out and weren't able to go to The Web That Was? Maybe you
think "platform death" is a total sham term and want to tear it apart? If
so, please do consider joining us and drop me an email with any questions.

Panelists would need to submit an abstract of 150 words to me by October
31st at the very latest, and I'm happy to provide more info via email re:
who else is on the docket and what we're hoping to achieve in Australia.

Thank you,

Muira McCammon

-- 
*Muira McCammon*
*Annenberg School for Communication *
*@muira_mccammon <https://twitter.com/muira_mccammon>*

Recently out: "After DeepNude, ideas for more conscientious coverage of
synthetic media
<https://www.cjr.org/watchdog/deepnude-ai-synthetic-media-ethics.php>
<https://www.cjr.org/watchdog/deepnude-ai-synthetic-media-ethics.php>"
in *Columbia
Journalism Review *