Link HERE. The below looks like what would have been an interesting conference. I did not present, but am copying below the abstract for the call for papers that took place. Following I'll post some related After Nature links.
"Re-thinking Relationality in the Sociotechnological Condition"
(May 19-20, 2016)
Abstract / Call for Papers
See also After Nature posts:Understandings of relations and relationality are currently under reconsideration both in sociology and media studies. Substantialist ideas of "the" social and "the" technological are frequently understoodto have been effectively replaced by concepts of hybridity,sociotechnicality, naturecultures, spatiality, networks, etc. However,t seems as though these more holistic notions again need to be revised to adress the intersection of power, technology, and normativity in contemporary societies. A more radically relational perspective which adresses modes of experience within and through relational orders may be better suited to grasp both the horizontal (interactive, valuative) as well as vertical (hierarchical, ordering) aspects of realities in the cybernetic sociotechnological condition. It promises to account for the constitution of reflexivity and agency in the co-individuation of technologies, norms, and subjectivity. Recent developments in sociological and media research contribute to this debate with a triadic concept of relationality. The symposium brings together different strands of relational thought and research in social theory and media theory. It adresses the following questions: In what sense is the relation prior to what is being related, such as subjects, other living beings and things? Do technologies supplement, augment or replace institutional, normative power? How can the related entities re-work relations? What are agency and reflexivity in communication, discourses, assemblages, infrastructures, dispositifs, institutions, when these are understood as radically relational phenomena? An attempt to re-think, describe and understand relations at once lived and engineered may allow us to come to terms with the affective, emotional, normative and political underpinnings of contemporary communication societies. The two-day event engages sociologists and media scholars in a dialogue about the artificial nature of contemporary social and technological relations and their epistemic, agentic, political and normative dimensions.
- "Attention Economy versus Attention Ecology"
- "The paradox of anti-relational philosophy"
- "Social Media Is Not Self-Expression" (article)"
- "Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks (article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)"
- "If Twitter is fading, what's next? (The Atlantic article)"
- "Nick Land on Twitter: a "eulogy" for the platform"
- "Why the modern world is bad for your brain" (Guardian article)
- "A note about "point scoring"
