Joern Langhorst- Media tactics and mediated resistance: Surveillance, sousveillance and counter-publics
This paper will explore how Michel DeCerteau’s (1984) seminal concepts of “spatial strategies” and “spatial tactics” play out in the realm of digital technologies and media. Past and contemporary concepts and experiences of “the city” are not just generated through production of images of urban space (the mediated city), but through production of urban space itself as image to be consumed and interacted with (the city as medium). This aestheticizes and reduces complex lived experience, producing a narrow range of acceptable meanings and behaviors, replacing the “aesthetics of performance” with a “performance of aesthetics”.
These aesthetic-visual practices play an important and often underestimated role in territorializing and deterritorializing loci and processes of memory, meaning, place and community identity, and need to be analyzed to understand “urbanity” and “city” in its quality as a socio-ecological assemblage involving conflicting and contested values and agendas. DeCerteau contrasted the participatory and immersive practices of the urban dweller from those of the mere voyeur in the production of urban space, pitting authochtonous, direct and active experience against the detached and passive consumption and re-production of urban space as imagery – or as data.
In the context of the struggle for smore just and equitable forms of urbanity this paper will explore diverse practices of surveillance and sousveillance and their interplay, and investigate their potential to contribute to spatial and spatialized justice.
Tuukka Lehtiniemi, Vassilis Charitsis and Mikko Laamanen- Algorithmic luddism: The emancipatory potential of collective acts of refusal in datafied societies
This paper theorizes Algorithmic Luddism as a form of collective action against algorithmic foreclosing of the future. Even as inequality, discrimination and forms of oppression are recognized in the context of algorithmic systems, scholarship is often dominated by a dystopian lust that suffers from data universalism (Milan and Treré, 2019) and class myopia. Little attention tends to be paid on political and socioeconomic contexts and differences: while algorithmic systems have material consequences for disadvantaged social strata, the “digital subject” tends to lack class characteristics, let alone class consciousness, in both mainstream and critical scholarship. In this paper, our aim is to work against this logic by advancing theorisation on social movements for the digital age (Charitsis and Laamanen, 2022). We bring the focus on collective mobilization and resistance that oppose dominant algorithmic politics and pervasive datafication processes. Drawing on a reading of the much-derided history of Luddism (Hobsbawm, 1952; Thompson, 1963) and engaging withrecent pertinent work on the topic (Mueller, 2021), we introduce the notion of Algorithmic Luddism to foreground acts of collective technology refusal centered around algorithmically accentuated class antagonisms. We aim to re-appropriate Luddism not to celebrate an anti-technology movement, but to explore how selective rejection of technology could pave the way for alternative algorithmic futures. The notion of Algorithmic Luddism, we argue, re-positions class at the center of analyses on algorithmic control, and highlights the social emancipatory potential of unmaking data extraction technologies and algorithmic systems. It also foregrounds the need for novel understandings of class struggle, and potentially the notion of class itself, in datafied societies.
Karoliina Talvitie-Lamberg, Leena Ripatti-Torniainen and Sanna Valtonen- Mediarefusers and geographies of hope – the participation and agency of social media non-users in the public realm
To what extent can individuals and groups engage with the public realm from beyond all social media? Question is critically important, since through the public realm meanings are constructed and shared in society, and agendas are formulated – between people unknown to each other.
Our study seeks to understand what absence from social media means for inclusion in and exclusion from the broader public realm. We frame the public realm as existing in extensive socio-cultural and political processes (Arendt 1958; Cayton 2007; Dewey 1927; Ripatti-Torniainen 2018; Warner 2002; Weintraub 1998). We use this conceptual premise to investigate the non-use of social media within the larger frame of participation and agency in the public realm.
Participation that occurs on digital platforms and in platform-generated social realities (Just & Latzer 2017; Raun 2018) introduces new mechanisms of vulnerability and exclusion (Couldry & Yu 2018; Charitsis 2019). The refusal to use social media platforms is a growing phenomenon, which seems to result neither from a lack of opportunities nor skills. It may also be a voluntary, conscious act (Hesselbreth 2018; Syvertsen & Enli 2020), a way to resist datafication (Talvitie-Lamberg et al 2022; Portwood-Stacer, 2013) – but not available to individuals in vulnerable positions (Büchi & Hargittai, 2022, van den Abeele 2021). The individual agency of refusal sheds light on the new forms of digital inequalities; data-driven social media platforms may be places of despair but for others of hope.
We collected non-users’ narratives (diaries and thematic interviews) from four different groups in Finland: 1) unemployed people, 2) immigrants waiting for their residence permits, 3) employees in leadership positions, and 4) established journalists in media companies. We analyze non-users participation and agency in social, cultural, and political engagements, through a combination of situational analysis and cultural discourse analysis.
Lucio Mello- Ideas for a genealogy of citizenship and mediatizations
As mediatization assumes centrality in everyday life (Hajvard, 2013) and has been shaping spatiality in different dimensions (Jasson, 2013), we advocate Foucault’s power relationality to comprehend how governmentalities (2004b) are imbricated with mediatizations and affects the very notion of citizenship. In this essay we propose to approach mediatizatization genealogically, having governmentality as key concept in research agendas committed with a genealogy of mediatization and citizenry.
In the first part we are going to identify different raison d’etats – pastorality, sovereignty, discipline, and security (Foucault 2004a ) – in media discourses and practices. Offering some examples we investigate those modes of governance to comprehend how power relations are constantly blurring media and citizenship, and meddling civic commitments, rights and practice.
In the second part we are going to concentrate on platforms ( Srnicek 2016) as a study case. We argue that mediatization assumes deeper imbrications (Hepp , 2020) arising unprecedented changes in subjectivations and subjections. We conclude this part by signaling the dangers in converging and reuniting all those modes of governmentality in one mega dispositif / mega-apparatus, i.e. China’s Weibo, Russia’s Telegram, but not only).
Finally we are going to map changes in the civic sphere that are arising and molding a new bios (Agamben, 2016) called bios mediaticus (Sodré, 2019) and intertwining not only individual everyday life but also transforming, local, regional, national and international established pacts and rules , rearranging new imagined communities (Anderson, 1983).
We conclude suggesting that platforms create a new governmentality in a supranationalscale and demanding new modes of mediations inherited in mediatization’s processes and practices.