[Air-L] ICA Preconference: Mis/disinformation and the artifices of authenticity and authentication

[ganaele]

Dear Colleagues,

The following CFP might be of interest.


ICA 2023 PRE-CONFERENCE
Mis/disinformation and the artifices of authenticity and authentication

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   Date: Wednesday, May 24, 2023. 9:00 - 17:00
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   Venue: York University, Toronto
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   Division affiliation: Communication & Technology Division
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   Fee: Registration will be free
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   Call for Abstract deadline: December 20, 2022

Description: The construction of authentic-feeling yet untrue information,
content, experiences, and relations is central to successful
mis/disinformation campaigns. The most outrageous lies can catalyze
opinions, behaviours and actions–as long as they appear authentic in
spirit, or come from a place or person that feels authentic. Authenticity
is the lever of the mis/disinformation complex: it is cultivated and
maintained through investments in mass-personal social networks (Gehl &
Lawson, 2022) that articulate together Russian bots and Donald Trump,
global conspiracies and one’s mundane chats. They channel interest in the
health benefits of oregano oil into paranoia about covert mass chip
implants through vaccination campaigns.

National and global mis/disinformation networks rearticulate authenticity
within local contexts while leveraging social media techniques and content.
Such industries of mis/disinformation are linked to violent and subtle
forms of erasure, othering, and denial, from the rejection of and attacks
against the inauthentic human according to fascist logics (Bratich, 2022),
to the deadly denial of basic realities like climate change or the benefits
of masking during an air-borne pandemic. Thus the rejection of most values
and realities as inauthentic in network cultures fuels cynicism, and
motivates shitposting, trolling, and bullshitting. Yet the contradiction of
these reactionary postures is that they can only perpetuate the very desire
for authenticity that they deny.

The industry of mis/disinformation comes in to fill in that breach: it
invests in new distributions of the sensible (Rancière, 2019) and
establishes relations of absolute trust within homophilic networks and
communities of the same (Chun, 2021). It also outwardly delegitimizes the
suffering of others and inwardly deadens and represses any true sense of
empathy towards an Other. After dismantling and reassembling the
socio-psychological experience of users in such fashion, the industry of
mis/disinformation turns towards justifying and legitimizing fear and
hatred by articulating them with other social emotions, formulating
explosive cocktails of affective intensities that fill in for the yearning
for authenticity.

Traditional affective structures are reworked to face threats: fear for
oneself, one’s family and one’s future about to be destroyed by enemies
near and close. In response to these threats, the networked and physical
spaces of encounters with radically different others become the dangerous
thing from which to turn away, with many users channelling their affects
instead towards nationalistic pride, anger and revenge, blind trust in
one’s closed off community, and quasi-religious ecstasy in communing with
like-minded people. In summary: fabricated mis/disinformation involves the
construction of felt, visceral experiences that are then defined as
authentic.

Through this, authenticity becomes an artifice with direct affective and
emotional impact. Mis/disinformation is not just about troubling notions of
truth and facticity to destabilize rational democratic communication, but
about the production of performances of authenticity both mundane and
spectacular. These performances establish norms and practices of
authentication – how something comes to be perceived as authentic by a
receiving party. And these artifices take on multiple forms, from
rhetorical performances to the labour of algorithmic recommendations, from
CGI to discursive norms. They mobilize proxies; technical, discursive and
cultural norms; sociotechnological affordances; bodies; and cognitive and
non-cognitive processes. They feed off and ride on affective, cultural and
informational dynamics, which they organize through fast responding
junctures and disjunctures, linking disparate data points into clusters
that then gain greater network visibility and therefore normalization, all
the while constantly refashioning themselves to respond to informational
flows and cultural and political reactions.

For this pre-conference, we seek critical explorations of authenticity and
authentication as they relate to digital manipulation and digital artifice.

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   How is authenticity in turn caught, created, faked, authenticated and
   managed through digital assemblages?


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   How is it both constructed as a felt experience, as well as machinized
   though automated recognition patterns?


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   If authenticity is key to misinformation, then what kind of
   interventions can we imagine to question, and undermine such articulation?
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   What new algorithms of authenticity (Chun 2021) could we imagine and
   deploy?

We are particularly interested in research that examines the fabrication of
digitally mediated authentic experiences, be they non-conscious and
habitual, or spectacular and deeply meaningful. We are interested in
research that explores how objects and persons come to be seen and
experienced as authentic and inauthentic, which includes paying attention
to how authenticity – in its affective, emotional, non-conscious and
cognitive dimensions – is constructed via technical affordances, media
habits, political rhetoric, mass-personal communication, network rhythms,
recommendation algorithms and targeted campaigns. Equally, we are
interested in work that critically and creatively challenges the
articulation of authenticity with misinformation.

We welcome a wide array of methodological approaches – qualitative,
quantitative, speculative, creative, participatory, collaborative and
others. We are open to different formats of intervention, from traditional
papers to research-creation. We also welcome proposals for short workshops
(1 hour length), demonstrations and other modes of collaborative inquiries.

Deadline: Please submit 150-200 words abstract to ICA2023Preconf at gmail.com
by December 20, 2022. Notices of acceptance will be sent on 11 January 2023.

Organizers:

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   Ganaele Langlois (Communication and Media Studies, York University)
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   Wendy Chun (Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University)
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   Alberto Lusoli (Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University)
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   Anthony Burton (School of Communication, Simon Fraser University)

For inquiries and information, please contact the organizing committee at
ICA2023Preconf at gmail.com.

The conference is funded by the generous support of York University, the
Canada 150 Research Chairs program, and the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council (SSHRC).


-- 
Ganaele Langlois (she/her)
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Communication & Media Studies
York University