unlikeus conference amsterdam day one [tmorning]

Todays conference was really good, and the venue was the upstairs from the subterrarian pit where yesterdays presentations took place. after a great breakfast Gert lovink gave a really good intro calling for a form of web sociology.

Jodi Dean (usa) spoke very interestingly about the constitution of the social in social media critique. she gave three definition of the contention that society does not exist. Her first the neo-liberal version as espoused by thatcher, the second a rendering provided by ANT/Object theory and third the version provided by Lacau & Mouffe. Her point was that social media is a mirror each of these contentions and the motif of the network, as the representative of the social, is a simulacra of these relationships. her claim was that if society did exist then there would not be a need for social media platforms.

She consistently problematicised social media critique for always talking of dispersion, privacy and identity concerns (a position she stated it shared with the neo liberal dismissing of society) what she asked would their version of social media look like ? was not more a fact that these critics had - from a psychoanalytic viewpoint - had issues with trust, that they did not trust these vast conglomerations.

So for dean it was not the issues of the vast numbers of users, the bottleneck, but rather that these were concentrated into the hands of one person/company. And that dispersion is more likely to produce the 'one' of neo liberal politics, as she said, 'no long tail without the strong one' - and there is in fact an underlying desire that people want to be part of a whole. for instance in the claim that twitter enabled the recent arab spring protests was dismissed as confusing the form, which allows for collectivity, and focusing on the content. FB then is the private ownership of this form of collectivity and that is the problem with FB.