Book launch: Communities at a Crossroads

When: April 15, 2019 17:00 - 18:30

Where: Spui 25 Spui 25-27 amsterdam

INC is happy to announce the publication of Communities at a Crossroads as the 28th book in our Theory on Demand series. The author of the book, Annalisa Pelizza, will be joined by Stefania Milan to discuss the book and open a discussion. Please join us on Monday April 15th at 17:00 hours at Spui25 in Amsterdam to celebrate the launch.

COMMUNITIES AT A CROSSROADS

How to conceptualize online sociability in the 21st century? To answer this question, Communities at a Crossroads looks back at the mid-2000s. With the burst of the creative-entrepreneur alliance, the territorialisation of the internet and the commercialization of interpersonal ties, that period constituted a turning point for digital communitarian cultures. Many of the techno-libertarian culture’s utopias underpinning the ideas for online sociability faced systematic counter evidence. This change in paradigm has still consequences today.

Avoiding both empty invocations of community and swift conclusions of doom, Annalisa Pelizza investigates the theories of actions that have underpinned the development of techno-social digital assemblages after the ‘golden age’ of online communities. Communities at a Crossroads draws upon the analysis of Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities archive, which is the largest of its kind worldwide, and in doing so presents a multi-faceted picture of internet sociability between the two centuries.

SPEAKERS

Annalisa Pelizza is a writer, teacher and associate professor in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the University of Twente (NL). Her research unfolds at the intersection of technology studies, communication science and political theory. Before embracing the academic career, she was active in building digital communities, worked as a media art producer and developed large-scale IT infrastructures.

Stefania Milan is Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Her research explores the interplay between digital technology and participation, and activism and social movements in particular, cyberspace governance, and data epistemologies. She is the Principal Investigator of DATACTIVE, a research project and a research collective exploring the politics of big data broadly defined.

 

Details:

Date: Monday April 15, 2019
Time: 17.00 – 18.30
Location: Spui25

Attendance is free, please register here:

https://www.spui25.nl/spui25-en/events/events/2019/04/communities-at-crossroads.html