Futuresonic 2008: The Social – Social Networking Unplugged
Submissions are now invited to the Futuresonic conference and the Social Technologies Summit. Proposals for talks, presentations and workshops plus also session themes are invited. Submissions of innovative formats for social interaction and experimentation are encouraged. DEADLINE 5pm, Tuesday 18 December 2007.
40 years after people took to the streets of Paris in 1968 calling for society to be abolished, join us as we go in search of the social today. The festival and conference will explore the new social spaces and the social implications of technologies for the many different kinds of people who make, use and are affected by them. Today we can occupy many different social spaces at once. Social software, online worlds, and the internet itself create an extension of social space, and new ways for people to find the stuff that interests them, link up with others, and share. Computers have become social interfaces for sharing digital media and collaborating to build online communities and folksonomies. In all parts of the globe people are seeking to open up or hold onto places to meet and communicate freely, online and offline. In India we see emergent kinds of community media, in South Korea new social uses of the mobile internet, and in Brazil the spread of ‘cultural hotspots’. The conference will explore how we can rethink all kinds of social space and social interaction – how can we remake cities, or intervene in the forces, inequities and inequalities that shape society. Some technologies are more social than others. Social technologies are bottom up and many-to-many instead of one-to-one or one-to-many. They can include technologies created and maintained by social networks, such as communities of developers and users working collaboratively with open source tools. But at the same time we see how electronic communication can isolate us, as more and more people drown in a deluge of email that generates stress, even reducing IQ. Additionally, ‘online communities’ are based upon an artificial equivalence between ‘users’ which obscures power relationships and issues of ownership. Digital culture burns bright with a vision of being not in isolation but in groups, placing the relations between people first. Beyond the hype lies ever greater isolation and conformity. Join us as we go in search of the social…
- Anne