Autopsia CFP: Insignificance
Insignificance
This CFP targets that most hazy of bull's eyes - the vast (digital) realm of narcissistic miscellanea. In a milieu of heavily concentrated self-display, web 2.0 has given edging to its promise of participatory interaction but with a clandestine obligation for self-marketing. To what end? Has web 2.0 and the active migration to online social media succeeded beyond its aims of decentralizing identity and categorical knowledge, leading to the production of pure, undifferentiated miscellanea? This issue of Autopsia is devoted to Insignificance, that feeling of potentially false liberation obtained through web 2.0 and social media. We wish to caution contributors to avoid Luddite pessimism or the assumptions of information revolutions that have made the world a better/worse place; instead, it is not that human civilization has grown "stupid" or more insignificant, but that new media technology has produced new ways of exposing insignificance. We want to explore the ways that insignificance has put us to a peculiar kind of work in the age of massification.
Possible topics:
The Dreadful Nirvana of Anonymity
Phishing for Compliments
The Churches of Star Searches
Views on YouTube in the Millions versus Next to None
Rejecting Attention
Misdirecting the Directory
15 Minutes of Blame
Characters Not in Search of a Story
Namelessness with or without changing names
Identity as Security Blanket
Friends as Traffic, Traffic as Friends
Kentucky Fried Proxy (Servers)
The Infrastructure of Pseudonyms
Freedom from Reputation
Accumulation as Degradation/Degradation as Edification
What do the Unknown Know?
//Autopsia 2009\
This CFP targets that most hazy of bull's eyes - the vast (digital) realm of narcissistic miscellanea. In a milieu of heavily concentrated self-display, web 2.0 has given edging to its promise of participatory interaction but with a clandestine obligation for self-marketing. To what end? Has web 2.0 and the active migration to online social media succeeded beyond its aims of decentralizing identity and categorical knowledge, leading to the production of pure, undifferentiated miscellanea? This issue of Autopsia is devoted to Insignificance, that feeling of potentially false liberation obtained through web 2.0 and social media. We wish to caution contributors to avoid Luddite pessimism or the assumptions of information revolutions that have made the world a better/worse place; instead, it is not that human civilization has grown "stupid" or more insignificant, but that new media technology has produced new ways of exposing insignificance. We want to explore the ways that insignificance has put us to a peculiar kind of work in the age of massification.
Possible topics:
The Dreadful Nirvana of Anonymity
Phishing for Compliments
The Churches of Star Searches
Views on YouTube in the Millions versus Next to None
Rejecting Attention
Misdirecting the Directory
15 Minutes of Blame
Characters Not in Search of a Story
Namelessness with or without changing names
Identity as Security Blanket
Friends as Traffic, Traffic as Friends
Kentucky Fried Proxy (Servers)
The Infrastructure of Pseudonyms
Freedom from Reputation
Accumulation as Degradation/Degradation as Edification
What do the Unknown Know?
//Autopsia 2009\
