Dear CRIT-GEOG-FORUM,
Rosie Cox and I are seeking expressions of interest for one additional contributor to a panel discussion we are organising for the 2013 AAG Meeting in Los Angeles. The full panel outline is below, but in brief, we seek to pick up on recent debates in such forums as the CRIT-GEOG-FORUM listserv about the merits and drawbacks of academic uses of new media, both in practical and theoretical terms.
If you are coming to AAG and would like to take part, please email both me ([log in to unmask]) and Rosie Cox ([log in to unmask]) by 19 October 2012 with one-to-two sentences on what you’d potentially speak to on the panel.
With best regards,
Scott
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Dr Scott Rodgers
Lecturer in Media Theory
Department of Media and Cultural Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX
Tel: +44 (0) 203 073 8370
Blog and personal website: http://www.publiclysited.com/
Birkbeck website: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/culture/our-staff/scott-rodgers
Between freedom and narcissism? New media, academic identities and circuits of knowledge production
Organisers: Dr Rosie Cox and Dr Scott Rodgers, Birkbeck, University of London
Academics’ growing use of blogging, and social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, has recently produced contentious debate. For some, such technologies and practices are simply a new means for ambitious academics to raise their professional profile; little more than a new venue for self-serving narcissism and preening. Others are more optimistic, seeing an expansion of freer, better distributed and more collaborative knowledge production as counteracting commercialized publishing venues and inflexible gate keeping practices in the academy.
Yet a modest scratch below the surface reveals that there are perhaps deeper issues at stake. In many ways, new media technologies and practices undermine academia’s basic ‘rules of the game’. There is a premium placed on that which is novel, quirky or interconnected, which destabilizes established scholarly standards of, and procedures for, determining originality and authorship. As a result, academic knowledge seems ever more abundant, speedy and ephemeral, chipping away at a system of relatively scarce, slow publication of knowledge, in which there are reasonable certainties about future archival availability. And, in as far as such forms of knowledge production become standard rather than exceptional, there is the risk that they become a burdensome form of labour, potentially leading to a platypus-like deskilling, particularly for early career scholars with more to prove.
A contrasting view however is that the rules of the game are not at all being undermined, but rather shifted in progressive new directions. Not only is academic knowledge becoming more distributed and potentially more collaborative, but its formalised expression is being fundamentally ruptured. With social media use in particular, new openings are often created willy-nilly between previously segregated personal and professional identities. Arguably, this affords channels and environments for writing, thinking and sharing that permit new forms of honesty, generosity and transparency.
This panel, therefore, seeks to get beyond the simple dichotomy between freedom and narcissism, and explore the multiple implications new media raises for both academic identities and wider circuits of academic knowledge production. We intend for panelist contributions to be informed not only by experiences of using new media, but also by various theoretical perspectives (e.g. on space, knowledge, thought, politics, media and technology) through which such practices might be interpreted.