[experimental society conference: lancaster]

International conference: The Experimental Society, Lancaster University, 7-9 July 2010

Experimentation, with its distinctive way of joining action and knowledge, has played a crucial role in the culture and politics of modern society, but one that has a number of contradictory strands.  In one strand, experimentation is associated with the opening up of the closed medieval universe into an open world of endless possibility.  This story would include the development of the arts as an autonomous space for free exploration, and practices of social, cultural and political experimentation that invent new ways of living.  It had perhaps its leading advocate in Friedrich Nietzsche, with his notion of life as a continuous experiment, but in the contemporary world it is also manifested in the everyday creativity (de Certeau) with which people experiment ‘casually’ with new forms of humanity, technology, space, economic exchange and political participation (Hayles, Stelarc, Soja, Ghosh, Rheingold, Lury).  

 Yet the dominant strand to the modern experiment has surely been that of experimental science, which from the 17^th century offered to solve the problem of social dissensus by putting all truth claims to public test, thereby replacing the received certainties of traditional society with the new certainties of objective facts and natural laws (Shapin, Schaffer, Toulmin).  In performing the split between nature and culture that Bruno Latour calls the ‘modern constitution’, the experiment thus started its long relationship with social ordering, technology and power, which has helped to legitimise the instrumental paradigm of modern political action (Ezrahi), drive forward the grand projects of 20^th century high-modernist statecraft (Scott), and shape the contemporary world of evidence-based policy, clinical trials and audits.  Critiques of this development include early warnings about the iron cage of instrumental rationality (Weber), twentieth century unease about technocracy and the scientisation of politics (the Frankfurt school) and autonomous technology (Ellul, Winner), and contemporary concern about the proliferation of states of exception in which experimental subjection and the reduction of the human to ‘bare life’ becomes the norm (Agamben).



It is time to ask whether the experiment is now too complicit with power to act as a carrier of the hopes of (post)modernity, or whether its emancipatory potential can be renewed through a sustained inquiry into the different forms that it takes in science and technology, in the arts and in wider culture. If experimentation and innovation have become too integrated with imaginaries of technological control, and thereby with consequent externalisations (Wynne and Felt), then further large questions arise not only for politics, but also for environmental sustainability.
However, any such project also needs to be sensitive to ways in which the key role played by experimentation in the ordering of society seems to be shifting away from the special to the general experiment – from the experiment as a bounded episode situated in time and space, to a generalised, performative experimentality.  Driven by pervasive informationalisation, we can observe a number of interlinked trends, including: the acceleration and proliferation of feedback loops between action and reaction; the displacement of fixed structures by networks and dissipative structures; the abandonment of fixed goals for continuous repositioning; and the carrying out of knowledge-work in the context of application.  Such trends can be observed in domains as disparate as science and innovation, network-centric digital warfare, finance capitalism, product design, software engineering, new media and popular culture.  Do these add up to a systemic transformation of how society is being ordered? Are humans no longer in control of their experimental ‘projects’, and what does this mean for our conceptualisation of the human and of politics?  Does this create the conditions in which a new kind of experimental society might be possible? How might we imagine this, and perhaps influence its form?
This three-day international conference is the culmination of Lancaster’s year-long research programme Experimentality, which in six two-day workshops and a range of arts events in the North West has been exploring the varieties and transformations of experimentation.  It will draw on the inquiries held in these events: into experimentation and eventality, into the forms of subject and object implicated in experimentation, into the experimentality of matter itself and into the social and spatial organisation of experimentation in urban life.  It will draw on recent work on experimentation as having its own logic (Hacking), as being shaped into experimental systems which produce novelty and surprise (Rheinberger), as involving pervasive everyday improvisation (Ingold), as brought to closure in different ways (Galison) and as enacted in different experimental spaces or 'truth-spots' (Gieryn).  It will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines, and practitioners from different spheres of social life, to set out and debate different diagnoses and visions of the experimental society.  It will be an interdisciplinary, collaborative exploration of the power of experimentation to shape the future. 
Questions to be pursued in the conference will include the following:

• Is experimentality becoming a key trope of contemporary society?  Is it taking new forms, and if so with what implications? 
• How can we learn from the differences between the modes of experimentality operating within science, the arts and wider culture?
• How do notions of experimentality intersect with other dominant notions of social change, such as societal reflexivity, liquidity, knowing capitalism, cosmopolitanism, mobility and complexity?
• What dangers to human freedom are posed by new, experimental forms of power?
• If a shift is occurring in modern society's ontology, so that ‘society’ is itself becoming self-interrogating, what does this mean for the social sciences? 
• How can the power to shape our socio-technical future be distributed more evenly in society?  Can people and publics appropriate 'the experiment' so that it operates as an engine of human freedom harnessed to the task of building a common world, rather than as a tool of power?
• If modern society is implicated in, perhaps dependent upon, forms of uncontrolled, unintended or blind experiment, what forms of regulatory ordering might be required? 

Plenary speakers will include:

·        Ulrich Beck (London School of Economics)

·        Dieter Daniels (Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig)

·        Bülent Diken (Lancaster University)

·        Silvio Funtowicz (European Commission Joint Research Centre)

·        Josephine Green (Social Innovation, Philips Design)

·        Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen)

·        Scott Lash (Goldsmiths, University of London)

·        Helga Nowotny (European Research Council)

·        Jerome Ravetz (University of Oxford)

·        Gísli Pálsson (University of Iceland)

·        James Wilsdon (Royal Society)

For further information and to book a place please go to http://www.lancs.ac.uk/experimentality/event/international-conference-experimental-society

If you have a query please contact:
Anne-Marie Mumford
Institute for Advanced Studies
County South
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YD, UK
Email: a.mumford@lancaster.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 1524 510816
Fax: +44 (0) 1524 510857


 

[journal issue: IT and politics]

The Journal of Information Technology & Politics Volume 6, Issue 3 & 4
(2009)
Special Issue: “Politics: Web 2.0” Visit: http://shrinkify.com/144k


Guest Editor's Introduction
“The Internet and Politics in Flux”
Andrew Chadwick

Research Papers
“Realizing the Social Internet? Online Social Networking Meets Offline Civic
Engagement”
- Josh Pasek;  eian more; Daniel Romer

“Typing Together? Clustering of Ideological Types in Online Social Networks”
- Brian J. Gaines; Jeffery J. Mondak

“Building an Architecture of Participation? Political Parties and Web 2.0 in
Britain”
- Nigel A. Jackson; Darren G. Lilleker

“Norwegian Parties and Web 2.0”
- Øyvind Kalnes

“The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: Overcommunication,
Miscommunication, and Communicative Overload”
- Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

“Developing the “Good Citizen”: Digital Artifacts, Peer Networks, and Formal
Organization During the 2003–2004 Howard Dean Campaign”
- Daniel Kreiss

“Lost in Technology? Political Parties and the Online Campaigns of
Constituency Candidates in Germany's Mixed Member Electoral System”
- Thomas Zittel

“Internet Election 2.0? Culture, Institutions, and Technology in the Korean
Presidential Elections of 2002 and 2007”
- Yeon-Ok Lee

“The Internet and Mobile Technologies in Election Campaigns: The GABRIELA
Women's Party During the 2007 Philippine Elections”
- Kavita Karan;  Jacques D. M. Gimeno; Edson Tandoc Jr.

[cross-disciplinary multimodal art]

Marlena Novak’s work is a cross-disciplinary hybrid including HD video, animatography, interactive time-based media, digital photography, and encaustic painting (BFA, Carnegie-Mellon; MFA, Northwestern) with solo exhibitions in Berlin, Cologne, Amsterdam, Enschede and the U.S. Her encaustic-painting technique was the subject of a documentary presented on PBS and she was invited to teach a course in this medium at the Amsterdam Institute for Painting in 1996.


Read more about Marlena Novak here: http://www.creativityandcognition.com/gallery/mnovak/mnovak.htm

[cfp: democracy and communication]

Call for Papers: Canadian Journal of Communication

Special Issue: Democratizing Communication Policy in the Americas: Why It Matters

Deadline for full papers December 15, 2009; publication date Fall 2010.

Communication policy is an often important but overlooked topic ­ a blind spot - in much social policy research and public discourse. Media and telecommunications systems have become so fundamental, ubiquitous and pervasive that we often take them for granted as enablers, and nothing more, of many other freedoms, rights, and capabilities. Many do not realize the extent to which policies concerning communication resources are quite vulnerable to fluctuating corporate and government interests.

This "knowledge gap" is what this special issue of the CJC seeks to address:

how do communication policies affect economic, social justice and human rights, and what are civil society organizations in the Americas doing about this? For example, how do the supposed decline of traditional news media such as newspapers, struggles over copyright, the emergence of new ways of communicating online, questions about who owns or controls the internet, or access to the information we need, relate to social policy concerns such as sustainable development, immigration, environmental degradation, labor rights, gender equity, and other concerns across the Americas? What do any of these struggles have in common related to media, communication, and internet policies?

With these ideas in mind, we seek two types of submissions from concerned experts working either in academic or non-academic settings in the Americas:

• Policy Contexts (i.e., Enabling/Disabling Legal and Regulatory Environments): Short syntheses of the current state of play re communication policy that includes attention to the full spectrum of convergent policy issues such as broadcasting, telecommunications, information (i.e., intellectual property rights and access to information laws), and internet governance policies in each of the following regions: North America (Canada and the U.S.); Mexico and Central America; the Caribbean; Spanish-speaking Latin America; and Brazil.
  

• Civil Society Responses: Research illuminating either failed (and why) or successful (and how) civil society engagement related any of the previously listed communication and social policy areas in terms of making policy making actors, processes or institutions more transparent, representative, and accountable to public vs. corporate interests. Simply put, we seek to know why and how communication policies matter to a variety of social policy concerns and how civil society actors are working to effect communication policy change in a variety of contexts.
  

For this special issue, and given our interest in linking media and communications with social policy more generally, we are also interested primarily in research that is informed by critical theory, social justice and/or human rights frameworks and that features praxis-oriented research capturing the various challenges and/or opportunities for public-interest oriented interventions in policy making processes across the Americas.

Full-length papers (7,000-9,000 words) in English or French should be submitted electronically following the guidelines laid out on the CJC submissions website (http://www.cjc-online.ca/submissions.php). Make sure to write in all caps "COMM POLICY" in the Comments to the Editor field, and also to include it on the cover page of your article as well. Please do
not include your name on the cover page.

Comments and queries can be sent to one or both of the special issue editors:

Dr. Leslie Regan Shade, Concordia University, leslieshade@gmail.com
Dr. Becky Lentz, McGill University, becky.lentz@mcgill.ca

[food politics]

I came across this hilarious take on the politics of cuisine via Chris at Eating is the Hard Part:

Flickr image from passiveaggressivenotes which can be found here.

[twitter & politics]

Is Twitter now a part of U.S. foreign policy? The Washington Post reports that:

The State Department asked social networking site Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance earlier this week in order to avoid disrupting communications among tech-savvy Iranian citizens as they took to the streets to protest Friday’s reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

That sounds like a wow. Only maybe not. A few grafs down the Post also reports that the White House downplayed the request this way:

“This wasn’t a directive from Secretary of State, but rather was a low-level contact from someone who often talks to Twitter staff.”

But a senior State Department official told the Post that the contacts were quite official.

“One of the areas where people are able to get out the word is through Twitter,” said a senior State Department official in a conversation with reporters, on condition of anonymity. “They announced they were going to shut down their system for maintenance and we asked them not to.”

On the other hand, is this all being blown out of proportion by the Twitter-loving press?

“Twitter’s impact inside Iran is zero,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, manager of a Farsi-language news site based in Los Angeles. “Here, there is lots of buzz, but once you look . . . you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves.”

Re: Twitter's impact inside Iran is zero? Not sure about that. If people are doing something outside of Iran, wouldn't that have an impact within?

See these stories too:

• Iranian Youth Protests Could Outlast Ahmadinejad Rule
  "Since the election, reformist Web sites, as well as Twitter and Facebook, have been cut off in Iran, although Iranians are evading the controls via proxy"
• Iran's Twitter Revolution "Ahmadinejad will twitter to his supporters he will save Iran from the rule of the twitter mobs and the Ayatollahs and mullahs will twitter"
• Dissecting Twitter's Role In Tech, Society, Politics"The Iran situation, where Twitter continued to provide communication resources to Iran residents after the government had shut down other communication"
• Iran's Protests: Why Twitter Is the Medium of the Movement "The U.S. State Department doesn't usually take an interest in the maintenance schedules of dotcom start-ups. But over the weekend, officials there reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12. Twitter moved the upgrade to 2 p.m. P.T. Tuesday afternoon — or 1:30 a.m. Tehran time." (this link via @SteveCadwell)

Article from Richard Koman at ZDNet.

[blogosphere blamed in political fakery]

What's that? Sarah Palin doesn't know that Africa is a continent. Well, I certainly wouldn't be jumping to defend her. I probably wouldn't think that she was misquoted. I'd assume, well, that she was Republican and that is pretty much synonomous with...well, you know.

When Fox news made this assertion, it was (mostly) taken as fact. Now that the election dust has settled, it turns out that Martin Eisenstadt who fed this information to Fox doesn't exist, and the guys who created the now famous character were really only trying to pitch a new tv show.

But, the imporant thing that you'll discover if you read the NY Times, it's all the fault of the blogosphere.

"Mr. Gorlin, 39, argued that Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television.
[...]
But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it."
[...]
Among the Americans who took that bait was Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. A few hours later Mr. Stein put up a post on the magazine’s political blog, with the title “Hoax Alert: Bizarre ‘McCain Adviser’ Too Good to Be True,” and explained how he had been fooled.

In July, after the McCain campaign compared Senator Barack Obama to Paris Hilton, the Eisenstadt blog said “the phone was burning off the hook” at McCain headquarters, with angry calls from Ms. Hilton’s grandfather and others. A Los Angeles Times political blog, among others, retold the story, citing Eisenstadt by name and linking to his blog.

Last month Eisenstadt blogged that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber, was closely related to Charles Keating, the disgraced former savings and loan chief. It wasn’t true, but other bloggers ran with it.

Among those taken in by Monday’s confession about the Palin Africa report was The New Republic’s political blog. Later the magazine posted this atop the entry: “Oy — this would appear to be a hoax. Apologies.”

But the truth was out for all to see long before the big-name take-downs. For months sourcewatch.org has identified Martin Eisenstadt as a hoax. When Mr. Stein was the victim, he blogged that “there was enough info on the Web that I should have sussed this thing out."

[facebook and job-hunting politics]

According to Toni Bowers at Tech Republic, hiring managers are increasingly discovering the need to address "casual" communication (texts, e-mails) from potential job candidates. She notes:

"While text-messaging lingo might be completely natural to these young people — indeed, for some it’s the only way they communicate — they fail to notice that those in positions of authority (who tend to be older) find such methods of communication disrespectful."

Funnily enough in today's column, Bowers tells us about hiring managers who do the opposite, they actually send out friend invitations to potential employees....The job candidate in question explains:

"To be honest, my face is in no book, I have no space, I’m neither linked in, nor linked out. I just don’t have any interest in social networking."

Akward position? There are 20 comments so far that say so.

[unscientific teaching in louisiana *science* classes]

In May last year I blogged about the Creation musueum that had just opened in Kentucky devoted to telling the history of the world...according to the bible. Well, know there's the Louisian State Education Act "is designed to slip ID in "through the back door", says Forrest, who is a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University and an expert in the history of creationism. She adds that the bill's language, which names evolution along with global warming, the origins of life and human cloning as worthy of "open and objective discussion", is an attempt to misrepresent evolution as scientifically controversial.

Forrest's testimony notwithstanding, the bill was passed by the state's legislature - by a majority of 94 to 3 in the House and by unanimous vote in the Senate. On 28 June, Louisiana's Republican governor, Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, signed the bill into law. The development has national implications, not least because Jindal is rumoured to be on Senator John McCain's shortlist as a potential running mate in his bid for the presidency.

***

Supporters of the new law clearly hope that teachers and administrators who wish to raise alternatives to evolution in science classes will feel protected if they do so. The law expressly permits the use of "supplemental" classroom materials in addition to state-approved textbooks. The LFF is now promoting the use of online "add-ons" that put a creationist spin on the contents of various science texts in use across the state, and the Discovery Institute has recently produced Explore Evolution, a glossy text that offers the standard ID critiques of evolution (see "The evolution of creationist literature"). Unlike its predecessor Of Pandas and People, which fared badly during the Dover trial, it does not use the term "intelligent design".

Because the law allows individual boards and teachers to make additions to the science curriculum without clearance from a state authority, the responsibility will lie with parents to mount a legal challenge to anything that appears to be an infringement of the separation of church and state. "In Dover, there were parents and teachers willing to step forward and say, this is not OK," says Rosenau. "But here we're seeing that people are either fine with it or they don't want to say anything because they don't want to be ostracised in their community."

Read the full article at New Scientist.

NB some of the comments in relation to this article in NS are hilarious while others are deeply saddening.

[take a stand against Mugabe]

Visit avaaz.org - the world in action website. Fill in your name and country and a message will be sent to the leader of your country (in the UK that's Gordon Brown). The aim is to get 100,000 messages protesting Mugabe as leader. Right now there have been 49,609 messages sent.

[politics 2.0]

via Wired.

[where's feminism now?]

Ok. So I suppose I should begin by acknowledging what a long way the U.S. has come. I mean, a woman and a non-white guy (omg) are in the running for president. However, watching the debate on CNN this morning just highlighted that we *still* need to be aware of gender bias. Perhaps Edwards and Obama didn't mean to divert the debate from important issues like abortion, immigration, education, health care, Iraq, same-sex marriages to personal attacks causing Clinton to respond (she must have practised after the Oct. 30th *debate*)

"I've just been personally attacked again. I don't mind taking hits on my record on issues, but when somebody starts throwing mud at least we can hope it's accurate and not right out of the Republican playbook."

Though Clinton didn't want voters to see gender as the issue: "She added they were not attacking her because she was a woman but because she was ahead. It was a good line, even if sounded well-rehearsed, aimed at women."

Hrm...after that reponse the debate seemed to refocus on presidential issues and I was feeling optimistic. That wasn't to be long-lived as during question time an audience member, a young woman, decided to invoke her right to query the system. She looked straight at Clinton and asked whether pearls or diamonds were her favourite. What?! That seems such an odd question and I wonder whether it was a plant to remind the voting public that at the end of the day Clinton is *just* a woman and should be relegated to the private sphere where concerns over which accouterment to employ reign supreme (or at least parallel with getting dinner ready).

I didn't catch the remainder of the question session so not sure if the male candidates were asked whether they preferred boxers or briefs...

[south african president fires deputy health minister who actually made a difference]

Former deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, an amazing, genuine, and driven person seems to be (or actually, was) one of the few forward-thinking and proactive people in politics in S.A. right now (certainly neither the the health minister nor Thabo Mbeki fall into either of these categories).

Madlala-Routledge put into place and fully supported a radical aids/hiv treatment plan in S.A. which enabled sick people (free!) access to treatment. Now, with the "health" minister in charge (known as "Dr. Beetroot" because she champions beetroot in the fight against aids) numbers of suffers will surely rise beyond the already epidemic proportions and not only because she sees antiretroviral medicine as poison. I'm stunned and dismayed that the South African president would cut off his and the country's line of hope and positive action in the aids fight.


Read the excellent Independent article A President in Denial, a Ravaged Nation Denied Hope which features Madlala-Routledge's own response.



For an idea of the idiocy that Madlala-Routledge has been up against take a look at this crazy response which supports Mbeki's move (if only because the former deputy health minister has an "unnecessarily complicated name" and that she's a woman!)







NB I met Nozizwe on a trip to South Africa a couple of years ago but knowing her only makes it more explicit for me how wrong Mbeki's move is.

[american universities and Truth]

Stanley Kurtz writes:

Last week I attended the premiere of Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary about campus political correctness. It’s a fun and powerful piece of work that deserves a wide audience. The film features plenty of encounters between Maloney and college officials who, after being embarrassed by Maloney’s questions, invariably summon police to have him evicted. These confrontations are entertaining, but the real force of this film flows from Maloney’s recounting of a series of incidents of campus political correctness. I had never heard of any of these cases. Yet each of them is remarkable.

from Evan Coyne Maloney's (the producer of Indoctrinate U) site.

[Google's $3.1 billion deal for the online advertising firm DoubleClick could put the company at odds with itself]

Internal conflicts often happen in finance, when investment banks find themselves advising both sides in a merger. And it happens in agribusiness, energy and other industries where giant companies with fingers in many pies are both buyers and sellers of the same commodity. But it is particularly common in technology and media.

The DoubleClick deal has prompted Microsoft and IBM and others to ask the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the deal on antitrust grounds. And privacy advocates worry that Google will not live up to its pledge to keep the customer data collected by DoubleClick out of the hands of Google's search managers.

But the thorniest conflicts could arise from DoubleClick's Performics division.

Performics helps its clients get better position in search results. Essentially, it works to game the systems of Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

"Google is treading in dangerous waters right now," writes Ross Dunn of WebProNews.com. Google's search results "are supposed to be unbiased and highly relevant," but with Performics, "Google is put into the conflicted position of trying to generate profits by providing result-oriented organic ranking services for its own 'unbiased' organic search results."

The worry, in other words, is that Google's search results could be compromised by operating a division with an interest in skewing those results in favor of clients.

[...]

"Google is treading in dangerous waters right now," writes Ross Dunn of WebProNews.com. Google's search results "are supposed to be unbiased and highly relevant," but with Performics, "Google is put into the conflicted position of trying to generate profits by providing result-oriented organic ranking services for its own ‘unbiased' organic search results."

The worry, in other words, is that Google's search results could be compromised by operating a division with an interest in skewing those results in favor of clients.


To continue reading the CNet article click here.

[presidential computing?]

"Hillary Clinton is a PC, Barack Obama is a Mac."

- Michael Gove (he is conservative mp for Surrey Heath after all....)


I know there are some hard-core pc (as in ibm-type) vs mac debates out there and certainly, macs are goregeous (not too sure about Obama though!) but dells are catching up quickly in the style stakes.
Here is a fun pro-pc blog post by Mike Rundle citing some things that pcs do better (yes, better) than macs:

• Window Resizing (I also have a mac book pro and the auto window sizing can be a pain)

Menubar Interaction

• Microsoft Office

Now, what is Gove trying to suggest, that looks are more important the performance? Hrm....