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EUGENE LANG COLLEGE PRESENTS:
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New York, October 12, 2009—On November 12 to 14, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts will host an international conference, "The Internet as Playground and Factory," which will explore the meaning and changing face of labor in the digital era. For three days, 90 theorists, artists, legal scholars, activists, students, programmers, historians, and social media experts will join to re-evaluate what constitutes unpaid labor, value, leisure, play, fun, and exploitation in an economy that is increasingly driven by the expropriation of all our blogging, data entries in online profiles, and submitted photos and videos. This event will commence a biennial series of conferences titled, “The Politics of Digital Media.”
"Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are changing the way citizens can speak truth to power,” said Neil Gordon, dean of Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. “Social networking services and mobile phone technologies allow activists and the millions of people who generate financial value online to re-think unionization, resistance, and even ways of making a living. Eugene Lang College is proud to begin an ambitious series of biennial conferences on digital media with an event drawing attention to labor, an issue that affects us all. With a focus on interdisciplinary education and an emphasis on civic engagement, Lang is the perfect platform to analyze social media and emerging forms of labor from the perspectives of the social sciences, arts, and Internet studies.”
The conference will be comprised of discussions, panels, presentations, a film screening, a playroom, a conference game, and a re-enactment of Facebook by a performance artist. The event seeks to advance the conversation about digital media beyond technological advances and commercial applications to touch upon vital issues facing the future of Internet users. Topics include motivations for social participation, exploitation of online play, data-lock, access across race and class, the precariousness of working conditions and unionization, political consciousness, and the social costs of government and corporate surveillance. Beyond critical analysis, the conference will seek to offer potential responses to the commercial culture of the global network of networks. It will address the dangers of yielding our pleasure, data, and friends to profit-oriented, mainstream platforms and discuss current alternatives and possible near-future scenarios.
"This conference alerts us to the fact that hundreds of millions of people continuously make the totality of their life energy available to a handful of enterprises,” said Trebor Scholz, conference convener and assistant professor of Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College. “ The speakers will join to propose different visions in which individuals and groups can be change agents in the building of alternatives. By approaching this subject through a series of collaborative follow-up events, we hope to support and continue the critical analysis of this ever-evolving social phenomena.”
Internationally visible authors, activists, and artists including Mark Andrejevic, Michel Bauwens, Jonathan Beller, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Gabriella Coleman, Sean Cubitt, Jodi Dean, Ursula Endlicher, Alexander Galloway, Pat Kane, M. Christopher Kelty, Nick Montfort, Lisa Nakamura, Christiane Paul, Howard Rheingold, Douglas Rushkoff, Fred Turner, McKenzie Wark, and Jonathan L. Zittrain will address issues of digital labor from various disciplinary standpoints.
The conference will take place at The New School campus in Greenwich Village. On Thursday, November 12, the conference will begin with a film screening of Sleep Dealers, a widely celebrated science fiction film about virtual labor, followed by a discussion with the director, Alex Rivera. The screening will begin at 5:00 p.m. in Room 404 of 66 W. 12th Street and be followed by a reception at the Eugene Lang Café at 7:30pm. On Friday, November 13, at 10:00 a.m., New School President Bob Kerrey will open the conference, which will run events in three parallel tracks. At 6:00 p.m. on Friday, performance artist Ursula Endlicher and Burak Arikan will perform “Facebook Re-enactments,” a piece about networked structures, identities, and online behavior. On Saturday at 10:00 a.m. at 66 Fifth Ave in Room 101, presenters include Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain, cultural critic Brian Holmes, media theorist Mark Andrejevic, and Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University.
To view the full conference agenda and list of participants, please visit www.digitallabor.org. The conference is free and open to the public, but advance reservations are required online. Video interviews with participants are available at www.vimeo.com/user2103510/videos/. You can enter the event discussion through Twitter at www.twitter.com/idctweets.
The digital labor conference inaugurates Lang College’s new conference series, “The Politics of Digital Media.” This ongoing series will work in collaboration with associated institutions to form working groups and networks to address issues from non-commercial infrastructures for social media, free software, the future of public media, artistic interventions, and curriculum about digital labor. The second conference will take place in 2011 and focus on media education. To participate, please join the discussion mailing list through the conference website.
This series is convened by Trebor Scholz, a new faculty member in Lang’s Department of Culture and Media. Along with McKenzie Wark, associate dean of Lang and author of A Hacker Manifesto, and independent filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, Lang College is establishing a next generation liberal arts curriculum by teaching both critical research and production tools to understand the pivotal role of culture and media in the contemporary world.
The conference is sponsored by the Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts in cooperation with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design, The Yale Information Society Project, The New School for Social Research, The Change You Want To See, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York University's Council for Media and Culture, and n+1 Magazine.
ABOUT EUGENE LANG COLLEGE THE NEW SCHOOL FOR LIBERAL ARTS
With a diversity of students, faculty, and academics, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts is a seminar-style liberal arts college located in New York City that was established in 1985. Remaining consistent to its founding philosophy, Eugene Lang College grew out of a highly progressive freshman-year program developed at The New School in 1973. Lang offers intensive liberal arts study as well as a faculty committed to teaching undergraduates in an interdisciplinary context. Areas of study include: culture and media; the arts; literary studies; economics, education studies, history, philosophy; religious studies, interdisciplinary science; social inquiry; and urban studies. For more information, visit www.lang.newschool.edu.
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