An event chaired by curator Trebor Scholz ...

Begin forwarded message:

> From: VLCIntern <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 30 March 2007 21:22:06 BST
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> Maya Rossi
> Programs Assistant, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics
> The New School
> 66 West 12th Street, #903
> New York, NY 10011
> 212.229.2436
>  
> * Panel Discussion
> Democratization and the Networked Public Sphere
> Friday, April 13, 2007, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
> The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
> 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
> New York City
> Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff, and 
> alumni with valid ID
>  
> Over the past ten years the public spheres have been dramatically 
> expanded by participatory web-based technologies. This evening at the 
> Vera List Center for Art & Politics will argue for the potential of 
> sociable media such as weblogs to democratize society through emerging 
> cultures of broad participation. It will focus on various arguments 
> for and against this central claim by examining present-day 
> understandings of the public sphere, ranging from theorists such as 
> Jurgen Habermas and Alexander Kluge to Lawrence Lessig and Yochai 
> Benkler.
>  
> This presentation will investigate the democratizing potential of the 
> Internet by examining the political participation of citizens who 
> contribute news reports to weblogs and wikis, knowledge repositories 
> such as the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia or the open source 
> software archive Freshmeat, web-based platforms for artistic 
> expression, and mobile wireless devices that allow for political 
> participation such as the organization of protests. Citizen journalism 
> as a corrective to the mass media in countries has had significant 
> effect in countries such as Iraq, China, the Philippines, South Korea, 
> Singapore, and the United States. Online knowledge repositories such 
> as the free encyclopedia Wikipedia are a challenge to copyright, and 
> the collaborative effort of many thousands of contributors creates a 
> quantitative and qualitative leap that corporate initiatives cannot 
> live up to. In the arts, participatory cultures are growing. Artists 
> intervene in public spaces, online and off. They send 
> remote-controlled robots into the streets of major cities spraying 
> political graffiti onto plazas. Artist collectives like the Institute 
> for Applied Autonomy solicit input from the urban population to create 
> an interactive map of the surveillance cameras in Manhattan. In 
> addition to web-based technologies, simple cell phones have been used 
> as tools to coordinate political actions. Communication theorist 
> Howard Rheingold writes about the “People Power II” revolution in 
> Manila in 2001, where demonstrations to oust then-president Estrada 
> were coordinated spontaneously through extensive text messaging. The 
> question of political participation in the networked public sphere is 
> central to destabilizing relations of domination.
>  
> Panelists:
> Danah Boyd, School of Information, The University of 
> California-Berkeley; Graduate
> Fellow, The Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern 
> California
> Ethan Zuckerman, Reseach Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and 
> Society, Harvard
> Law School
>  
> Additional speakers may be announced.
>  
> Moderator:
> Trebor Scholz, artist, media theorist, Professor at the Department of 
> Media Study, the   State University of New York at Buffalo
>  
> * This event is presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s  
> program cycle on “The Public Domain.”
>  

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Beryl Graham, Professor of New Media Art
School of Arts, Design, Media and Culture, University of Sunderland
Ashburne House,
Ryhope Road
Sunderland
SR2 7EE
Tel: +44 191 515 2896    [log in to unmask]

CRUMB web resource for new media art curators
http://www.crumbweb.org