A seminar with Noortje Marres on digital platforms, networked imagery and ethnographic description
Thursday, September 21, 2017 at 12-16:00 in room 5A14/16 at IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen S.
Organized and sponsored by the ETHOS Lab and the Data as Relation research project/Velux Foundation.
The seminar asks: How to understand interconnected, digital platforms and online, networked imagery as materials that prompt new forms of ethnographic descriptions? How might the multiplying of environments transform our interpretative practices and theoretical inquiries? What might speculative, experimental or creative takes on ethnographic description (situated analytics) offer in this regard?
Digital platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and others are by now an integral part of social life for many and form environments for organizational world-making. Michel Callon has proposed that social scientists follow the world-building activities of actors, whose concerns they share. In this workshop, we take up the baton, firstly, by focusing on world-making activities in which the presence of digital platforms and the interactions between them are pivotal. And, secondly, by attending to our own interpretation and theory-building of world-making activities on and across digital platforms.
We are interested in the conditions of being ‘a following science’ in a ‘platform society’ where the social is always-already digitally and algorithmically shaped. For the techno-sociologist, -anthropologist, or STS researcher the situation is becoming slightly complicated by this pre-formatting. Not only is there no social context available for analysis (we got rid of that long time ago with ANT), but there is no technical context either, as environments are multiplying. Rather than environments for the happening of the social, the environments have themselves become events in the face of ongoing, constantly transforming social and organizational realities.