Many claims have been made about the emergence of a digital turn that has radically transformed the possibilities for politics through traditional, modernist and postmodernist binaries of subject/object, state/society, politics/economics, public/private, consumption/production, time/space, mind/body, labour/leisure, culture/nature, and human/post human. This turn has run through several phases, beginning from cybernetics, databases, artificial intelligence, personal computers, at 20th century, up to social media, targeted digital advertising, self-quantification, big data, and cloud computing, at 21st century. This session will develop interdisciplinary assessments of the digital’s impact on society. It will interrogate the claims of both positive features and critical rethinking of social media activities. “Digital optimists” assert that Internet and social media create new forms of community and solidarity, creative innovation, participatory communication, social activism, and distributed democracy. “Digital critics” argue that digital technologies have not brought only positive change, but have rather engendered controversial phenomena as political consumerism, purchasing practices, and at the same time extended domination through new forms of control as well as networked authoritarianism, digital divide and new digital alienation 2.0, or the rise of the surveillance society.
Presenters will engage with the possibilities, potentials, pitfalls, limits, and ideologies of digital activism through social media practices. And participants are welcomed to explore main challenges of Internet participatory culture, futures, places and possibilities of critique in the age of digital subjects and digital objects.
Oksana LYCHKOVSKA-NEBOT, Odessa National I.I. Mechnikov University, Professor Associated, Ukraine and Oksana LYCHKOVSKA-NEBOT, Odessa National I.I. Mechnikov University, Professor Associated, Ukraine
