[Nettime-nl] Marianne van den Boomen lezing, gegeven door Leah Lievrouw (Utrecht, 24-11)

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

Marianne van den Boomen Lecture 2016

On Thursday, 24 November at 17.00 the first annual Marianne van den Boomen Lecture will be held at Utrecht University in the Auditorium of University Hall (Academiegebouw), followed by drinks.

This lecture series is dedicated to the memory of Marianne van den Boomen (1955-2014), a Dutch internet and digital media activist who wrote on information technologies from as early as 1984. Having worked for two decades as a journalist and online editor, participating in numerous initiatives in the field of digital media, she started lecturing at Utrecht University in 2003, where she also wrote her PhD on material metaphors in new media. Even though her disease made it especially challenging to continue, she completed and successfully defended her thesis in 2014, just a few months before she passed away.
 
The lecture series aims to study societal and cultural impacts of digital media. Every year a leading scholar in the field is invited to address the changes, opportunities, and challenges brought about by the mediation and datafication of everyday life, and to discuss the consequences these processes have for institutions, inclusion/exclusion politics in the public sphere, citizenship, and for our private lives.
 
We are extremely pleased to announce that the first Marianne van den Boomen Lecture will be given by Professor Leah Lievrouw, UCLA, Department of Information Studies. In her talk, titled “Algorithms and Activism: Resistance in the Age of Data”, Lievrouw will address “emerging forms of data-focused engagement and resistance in the context of algorithmic media, drawing examples from data activism, design activism, data journalism, civic hacking and community informatics, and activist projects and movements like Anonymous, Black Lives Matter, and the Edward Snowden and Aaron Swartz cases, among others.” Please see the attached pdf for an abstract of the talk.
 
As the venue holds a maximum of 150 people, we would kindly like to ask you to register for the event via Google Forms at:https://goo.gl/forms/nhNkYveoYw08Da2A2 <https://goo.gl/forms/nhNkYveoYw08Da2A2>.
 
Imar de Vries | New Media & Digital Culture
Faculty of Humanities | Utrecht University
Office: Muntstraat 2A (#1.06)
Snailmail: Muntstraat 2A, NL-3512 EV Utrecht
T: +31. (0)30. 253-96 01 | F: +31. (0)30. 253-61 67
tantalisinglyclose.com <http://tantalisinglyclose.com/> | newmediastudies.nl <http://newmediastudies.nl/>

Algorithms and Activism: Resistance in the Age of Data
by Leah A. Lievrouw

Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

Most observers of the uses of digital media in recent social and political activism have focused on "Web 2.0" or social media systems, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and so on, whose features support mobility, connectivity, interpersonal interaction on a vast scale, and the supposed ability to work around mainstream media.

 But the limited success and sustainability of recent uprisings like Occupy, the Gezi Square protests in Turkey, and the so-called Arab Spring movements, raise important questions about authoritarian regimes' growing abilities to sabotage or block Internet access and to exploit or subvert users' social media activities. Critics deride popular expressions of solidarity on Twitter or Facebook as empty "hashtag activism," requiring no sustained commitment or real risk.

Activists, artists, and advocates today must ask, What are the options and prospects for using digital media effectively as shifts toward the data-driven "Web 3.0"? As floods of online content, individuals' social media traces, the pervasive data capture of the "Internet of Things" and the unlimited computational power and storage of "the cloud" become the raw material for algorithmic manipulation, surveillance, and control, and render individuals as data subjects, what are the opportunities for action? Will there be moves from what Henry Jenkins has called "attention-based activism" -- where action amounts to audience membership in a consumerist framework of production and consumption -- to new forms of interventionist practice where the ethos of making and hacking are core competencies?

This talk explores emerging forms of data-focused engagement and resistance in the context of algorithmic media, drawing examples from data activism, design activism, data journalism, civic hacking and community informatics, and activist projects and movements like Anonymous, Black Lives Matter, and the Edward Snowden and Aaron Swartz cases, among others.   
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