[liberationtech] Inauguration lecture Christian Fuchs: Social Media and the Public Sphere

[James Losey]

Hi Marisol,

Thanks for sharing. Will a video be available?

Best,
James


On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 12:27 AM, Marisol Sandoval
<marisol.sandoval at uti.at>wrote:

>  Social Media and the Public Sphere
> Inauguration Lecture
> Christian Fuchs
> Wed. Feb 19, 2013, 18:00
> Univ. of Westminster, Regent Street Campus
>
> More information is available here:
>
> http://www.westminster.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/inaugural-lectures/2014/social-media-and-the-public-sphere
>
> Registration is requested and possible here:
>
> https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/inaugural-lecture-series-2013-2014-social-media-and-the-public-sphere-tickets-7899322085
>
> Social media has become a key term in Media and Communication Studies and
> public discourse for characterising platforms such as Facebook, Twitter,
> YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Wordpress, Blogspot, Weibo, Pinterest,
> Foursquare and Tumblr. This lecture will discuss the implications of social
> media for power structures in society, the economy and politics.The lecture
> will first discuss the question “What is social about social media?”.
> Providing answers requires a social theory understanding of what it means
> to be social. The lecture will explore different concepts of the social and
> relate them to the realm of the media.Social media are an expression of the
> tendency that in contemporary society boundaries become liquid. The
> distinctions between the private and the public, play and labour (playbour,
> digital labour), work and leisure, production and consumption
> (prosumption), individual and collective action, online and offline,
> networking and autonomy, spatial distance and co-presence, anonymity and
> knowledge, presence and absence, appearance and disappearance, and
> visibility and invisibility, are blurring. This lecture will discuss what
> risks and opportunities these changes imply for society. Many political and
> academic discussions about the implications of social media for society are
> concentrated on the question of whether social media enhance or endanger
> various dimensions of the public sphere. Whereas some say that social media
> make the economy more democratic and have been used as tools of revolutions
> and democratisation (‘revolution 2.0’, ‘Twitter/Facebook revolution’),
> others hold that social media are first and foremost instruments of control
> and commerce. The lecture will engage with Habermas’ concept of the public
> sphere and discuss social media’s variety of implications for the
> structural transformation of the public sphere.Whereas we are accustomed to
> the idea of public service broadcasting, an understanding of how a public
> service internet could look and be advanced is largely missing. This
> lecture wants to contribute to the public discussion of how the social
> dimension of the internet and the media can serve the public interest, the
> concept of a public service internet and how ideas for specific
> organisation, policy and funding models could look like.
>
>
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