Publishing and Becoming-Public after Social Media

From Facebook's dubious role in the Trump election and Brexit to the destruction of Twitter, incompatibilities with current EU legislation, the reddit blackout and beyond: the major social media platforms are in a prolonged crisis. In the short term, this will not significantly shake their position of power, but will at least cause disruption - and thus create space for new approaches and developments. For example, non-commercial social web projects such as Mastodon, which have become more widely known since the end of 2022, and the wider context of a "Fediverse" could become stable niches. There is new potential for the developments of media and technologies to reconnect with social imaginaries and emancipatory desires in order to create contexts that anticipate a time after social media.

The workshop is dedicated to an in-depth discussion of these processes, questioning the imperatives of permanent "communication" and subjectivations governed by algorithmic automatization, but also looking at tools and strategies that are conducive to distributing information in times of political unrest through examples of non-traditional or even clandestine publishing practices. It deals with historical and current feminist methods of community organizing and the history of the connections between activism and social media, so as to ask about the new structural possibilities of the Fediverse as well as the problems it has to deal with. The central practical question of content moderation will be discussed in regard to processes of agency and subjectivation, and finally the workshop will attempt to explore the potential of the social web for developing new forms of transcending the separation of production and reception, which differ from established concepts of "participation" and "user-generated content".

The format will be that of reading circles. The six speakers will each propose a focus for discussion and a short text excerpt, and the various topics will be developed and interlinked on the basis of joint reading and discussion. The open end workshop will start at noon and will take place in Vienna. It will be held in English. Participation is free, but the number of participants is limited. Please register informally by sending an e-mail to contact@eipcp.net. The proposed short text excerpts will be sent to registered participants and the venue will be announced.

Speakers: Lina Dokuzović, Valeria Graziano, Christoph Hubatschke, Katrin M. Kämpf, Stefan Nowotny, Felix Stalder

Text on the workshop:
Aileen Derieg: Outside the Checkbox: Politicizing the Place of Social Media in Society at Large
https://berlinergazette.de/outside-the-checkbox-politicizing-the-place-of-social-media-in-society-at-large/
 

This workshop is part of the project 'Peripheral Visions', which is supported by the Creative Europe Programme (2021-27) of the European Union; the eipcp's participation is co-funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.