Call for papers (open until May 15., 2010):
A session in The 2nd International Power & Knowledge Conference, Tampere, September 6-8, 2010
http://tinyurl.com/yfvgyh6
The collective knowledge creation on various wiki-sites, including the massively popular Wikipedia, is having a profound effect on the social and epistemological conditions of public information. Distributed collaboration, possible anonymity, radical equality and global reach of wikified information lead to a situation that at the same time democratizes knowledge production by levelling hierarchies of expertise and increases the postmodern condition of reflective uncertainty. Everybody knows that the Wikipedia can not be trusted in the same way as, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica, yet over 100 million people utilize the Wikipedia daily. The ‘edit’ and ‘history’ buttons ever present on wiki pages are already starting to exert pressure on information presented elsewhere. For instance, the negotiations on what information to include and how the information should be presented in various Wikipedia entries constitute a huge experiment in the use of public reason à la Kant. Consequently, the dynamics of collective collaboration also bring out questions on the nature of rationality and plurality of knowledge. Wikis provide ready made windows into the dialectical interplay between knowledge creation and issues of identity, social inclusion, authority, and the interface between information and politics.
The session invites contributions discussing these themes through theoretical reflection and/or empirical case studies. Abstracts should be between 150-200 words of length.
Abstract submission: http://tinyurl.com/yk98dgk
Organizers & more information:
Organizers: Tere Vadén, tere.vaden ä uta.fi , Teemu Mikkonen, teemu.mikkonen ä uta.fi, Juha Suoranta juha.suoranta ä uta.fi