Should "new media" continue to be the term?
The way Lovink looks at the hermeneutical aproach: "Hermeneutical tradition of literally laying out the text and the different directions of interpretation"
Common in software studies-->trying to understand whether there are different layers of meaning; can we lay out software the same way we lay out text
Steve's wife: Hermetically Sealed: media and security in intelligence communities
Lovink says you can no longer read Deleuze and then try to apply it to a website. There is a strong desire to move into the realm of philosophy and leave behind the restricted, self-referential scenes of new media; try to position themselves in teh wider debate of philosophy.
policing of the field-->art curators may dispute an artist's claim that he/she is a contemporary artist, bc you can't disconnect from your background
The mediasphere is now only one of many forms of the digital in the networked economy.
What is the status of theory in our field today?
Theory as method-->Mike says he doesn't always agree with Adorno, but he always goes back to him for what he was doing at that time.
Steve: The argument of terms is part of the process of staking out political boundaries. See how the object of study relates to theoretical concepts.
TK: How meaning is ascribed-->gives other lenses to understand different perspectives and different ways to "float your object of study around"
Legitimizing-->the unstated, driving theory behind theoretical discourse in the field.
Network fragmentation-->
Roderic: "salad bar approach" to theory-->"strategic agnosticism"-->you can be doctrinaire about methods; that's how you police the boundaries between disciplines
Lovink-->maybe methods is the new theory?
Stephanie: thinking about
need to be responsive to your object of study
TK: historical pastiche may be what we're inheriting
Steve: "the department has become the method"
Excommunication is building up something new by going back
This going back to project forward is interesting-->Wark wants to develop something that only addresses the current crisis
<a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/where-next-for-media-theory/#.U0hUbF7D5h4">McKenzie Wark</a>
Lovink: for him the question of methods is becoming central; the real question is where next for media methods
that's the challenge for big data; the solutionism Morozov raises
So what is the status now for media theory? It's becoming less important and less visible. Now there's an overproduction of practice that detracts from a focus on theory that would have been common in a class like this 10 years ago.
1930s period of long global recession, genocide, globalization; growing uncertainty-->MT: so what happened then and how might we draw insight from that?
different fields of practice deal with this in different ways; if you look at the world from visual/contemporary arts, maybe there are more productive ways to synthesize the theory with the practice, but maybe that's only an aftermoath of how things ideally went in the 80s & 90s when these things were more in synch, or maybe thinking about the may be nostalgic; if there is still a link bt contemporary art practice and theorization, how do you experience that?
Mike: The theory is coming directly out of the practice-->take the frame from the practitioners and then postulating the theory subsequently; the idea of trying to apply a theory to a practice is contrary to
Walter Benjamin's theory -- looked at current phenomenon
If you were to apply it now, you'd have to historicize it
MT: I think I'm completely lost with this conversation. Isn't that the whole point?
Mike: conxn bt aesthetics and ethics
Starr, Bowker, Edwards-->helpful in terms of dealing with materiality and cultural discourse, as well as the structure of power and agency
Mike: discourse becomes personal; method can become political strategy
TKG: Boris Groitz--"uses theory interestingly without making a fetish of it"
MT: theory is historicizing the worldviews/debates surrounding the discourse-->understanding perspectives and why people are so committed to them
Wikipedia project
Wikipedia Project
WikiMedia foundation, conferences, gatherings
attempt to organize sthg to reflect on this phenomenon
structure for decision making, mechanism for disputes, metalevel for decision making
related to other questions of online collaboration and reflects back to older discourse on online communities
how do these social groups/movements/entities manage themselves? how do they deal with difference and decision making
critique of western knowledge production can be applied to all of science
designing debate: the philosophy of wikis is that the presentation is neutral, and behind this are the debates and expression if opinions-->Lovink says this is one of the major flaws of Wikipedia bc
it is a design mistake at the very core of the whole project; integrating points of difference might save Wikipedia
different points of view must become integrated in the presentation-->but this is not allowed
MT: certainly replicates existing power dynamics bc privileged can afford wiki management, gives voice to geeks, but still resists alternative perspectives
gender debate is still very big
MT: could the issues troubling Wikipedia reflect the tensions of contemporary society?
Stuart Geiger at UC Berkeley-->Lovink recommends his work if you're interested in a Latourian approach; studied the role of bots: 60% of edits are done by bots
bots are deployed during periods when Wikipedia stagnates; cultural deficiencies compensated by bots
rather than dealing with the issues of bias, employed more bots
interesting ideas: MT: Sweden's effort to eliminate gender-specific pronouns
offline access to Wikipedia
knowledge production perspective-->it's part of a larger ecology-->open scholarship
open access to scientific journals; Aaron Schwartz; politics of scientific digital projection that we talked about this morning; certainly connected to the politics of knowledge
approached through search engines, publishing, encyclopedias; these are all different inroads where people are working in approximately the same direction
MOOCs, "are MOOCs the perfect way to privatize publicly funded education and research?"
Roderic: critique of free and open-->room here for strategic interventions; UC's open access policy
Lovink is skeptical of the Wikipedia:Google "secret" why has it changed?
thus far, it has been a cabal of tktktk?
Lovink produced this with the Society for Internet in Society