[Sarai Newsletter] Elizabeth Losh - The Metadata is the Message: Social Media and the Rhetorics of Online

[The Sarai Programme]

*Centre for the Study of Developing Societies/ Sarai*
invites you to a lecture
*
*
*The Metadata is the Message: Social Media and the Rhetorics of Online
Activism*
by *Elizabeth Losh*

Date and Time: Wednesday, 4th September 2013, 5 pm

Location: Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Civil Lines, Delhi



*Abstract:*

>From the so-called “Arab Spring” to the Delhi rape case, the relationship
between transnational digital interaction and massive civic participation
is remarkably complex. As users remix, tag, map, visualize, and curate
particular political memes, they rarely behave like ideal citizen
journalists or adopt a neutral hacker ethic. The high-profile debate about
whether or not “the revolution will be tweeted” in the United States
between Clay Shirky, Malcolm Gladwell, and Evgeny Morozov about the
expression of the general will of postcolonial others often ignores the
messiness of experiences of co-presence facilitated by computational media
and distributed networks.  This talk will discuss how seemingly subversive
practices involving file integrity and naming conventions are reshaping
notions of privacy and security in digital human rights discourses.


*Elizabeth Losh* directs the Culture, Art, and Technology program at Sixth
College at the University of California, San Diego, where she teaches media
history, digital literacy, online communication, and critical theory. She
is the author of *Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government
Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and
Mistakes* (MIT Press, 2009) and the forthcoming *The War on Learning:
Gaining Ground in the Digital University* (MIT Press, 2014) and is the
co-author of *Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to
Writing*(Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013) with Jonathan Alexander. She has
published
articles about the politics of new media, e-government initiatives, the
digital humanities, software-specific labor cultures, and the rhetoric
surrounding regulatory attempts to limit everyday digital practices.
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