Public Lives/Private Platform: Politics of Twitter

/in /by

Symposium 23-24 May 2017, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
With the support of Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Jillian C. York (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Confirmed Speakers:

Dipsaus Podcast, featuring Seada Nourhussen, Ebissé Rouw, and Mariam El Maslouhi. Curated by Nina Köll.

Flavia Dzodan – “Our Collective Unconscious of Violence”

Nora Reed

For symposium schedule, click here.

Speaking in 2013, Dick Costolo, then CEO of Twitter envisioned the site as “a very public, live, in-the-moment conversational platform” describing it as the “global town square.” With this concept, Costolo imagined the site’s users as producers, consumers and citizens participating in a digital commons. In the years that followed, Twitter drew criticism for its free speech absolutism, which while providing a space for marginalized voices, also left those populations vulnerable to harassment and abuse. In the aftermath of the Gamergate controversy, Twitter made small steps toward addressing abuse, giving users new tools to protect themselves. However, their commitment to free speech has created ever greater tensions within a virtual town square that replicates disparities in local, national and global power relations.

Twitter is at once the soapbox of the powerless and the platform of the powerful. It is the megaphone of the voiceless and an echo chamber for state and corporate speech. For instance, while Twitter has helped launch vital grassroots social movements like Black Lives Matter, it has also fomented the rise of the alt-right and the emergence of the world’s first Twitter President, who uses the microblog as a bully pulpit and policy platform. While it has suspended ISIS-affiliated accounts, it has verified those of high profile white nationalists. While it has given space to anonymous activists around the world, it has given new tools of surveillance to the states they agitate within and against. This crowded town square is moderated by complex algorithms, contradictory policies and competing regimes of public and private censorship.

How does Twitter’s shared town square invite us to rethink the theoretical and practical limits of free speech? Where is the potential for social and political change in a space that is at once public and privatised, civic and commercial? What can we do to help defend the space claimed by those most marginalized within this public square, alongside their more powerful antagonists?

These questions about the political life of Twitter affect every message that circulates within the square. Its 140 character limit has led to a seemingly infinite variety of expressive styles and forms of communication. Every few hours, thousands of hashtags rise and fall, trolls provoke, Trump boasts and bots tell jokes while corporate drones perform customer service before a global audience of millions. Amid the din, people make real connections, plant the seeds of social movements, supplement (and contradict) the official news, and build communities of support that extend beyond digital limits.

We call for researchers, artists and activists to reflect on how Twitter has expanded, complicated and advanced the concept of free speech. We are especially interested in explorations of Twitter’s potential as a site for social change, and of the unique forms of political and cultural expression that this space makes possible.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

  • Twitter and activism
  • Crowdfunding, signal boosting and support networks
  • Citizen journalism
  • Black Twitter
  • Trans and queer identity on Twitter
  • Twitter feminisms
  • Twitter and disability
  • Appropriation, intellectual property and mass media
  • Diaspora politics and Twitter
  • Occupy
  • Black Lives Matter
  • NoDAPL
  • (In)visibility: anonymity, pseudonyms, doxxing, hacking, alt-accounts, verified accounts
  • Twitter tactics: hashtags, subtweeting, retweeting, blocking, muting and more
  • Call-out culture, shaming and pileons
  • The politics of memes, trolling and satirical accounts
  • Twitter linguistics
  • Weird Twitter, irony and humour
  • Twitter literary genres
  • Twitter entrepreneurship and self-branding
  • Twitter and academic life
  • Twitter litter: shitposting, inside jokes and other detritus
  • Temporalities of Twitter- reverse chron reading, news cycles and talk across time zones
  • The post-human social network: bots and algorithms as content producers, zombie accounts, dead accounts
  • Corporate Twitter, advertising and performative customer service
  • Twitter diplomacy
  • Trump and the Twitter presidency
  • The °alt right° and global ethno-nationalism
  • Twitter and state violence: the CIA, Pentagon, IDF & more
  • Twitter police: the tough business of Twitter rules
  • Regimes of censorship

We will consider contributions in the following formats:

  • Research papers for 15/20 minute presentations
  • Workshop proposals
  • Performances
  • Journalistic and/or polemical presentations
  • Live remote Twitter presentations

Proposals should be no longer than 300 words and include a short bio with your Twitter handle and any other material that could support your idea.

Proposals should be submitted to politicsoftwitter@gmail.com no later than March 20, 2017. Applicants will be notified by March 27, 2017.

NOTE: It’s no longer possible to submit your proposals.

Students

The rMA students presenting at the symposium will earn 4 ECTS. Presentations will be around 20 minutes long. The assessment will be based on the final draft of the presented paper, consisting in 3,000 words. Upon proposal acceptance, rMA students will have to enrol through the NICA office in order to receive ETCS certificates.

More info on politicsoftwitter.wordpress.com and on Twitter @plpp_