Chandigarh, Panjab, India
Ever since the 1989 publication of Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in English, theorists from a wide variety of disciplines have engaged with the Habermasian notion of the public sphere, its relation to bourgeois society and class formation in general, its traction with minority cultures, its conception of gender and its separation of spheres between the public and the private. An important thesis of Habermas's text was what he saw as the degeneration of a rationally based mode of public deliberation into a consumerist society dominated by a mass media that was itself compromised by its relationship with the State. His critics, in turn, have argued that such a transformation was not in fact a degeneration but a marker of a more egalitarian and democratic public culture. This conference seeks to re-examine the contours of this debate in the light of the significant transformations in digital technology and human communication that have taken place over the last few decades.
The rapid expansion of the internet, along with email communications, online forums, social blogging and social connectivity websites have transformed the ways in which individuals interact and communicate with each other in fundamental ways. The transformations have not only been drastic in terms of how internet-connected individuals organize the daily routines of their personal lives but it has also affected in many ways their own self-fashioning as private and public individuals. The rapid changes have also meant fundamental structural changes in the institutions that have traditionally served as key elements of societal communication and deliberation. For instance, as more individuals communicate via email and as more enterprises advertise online, the U.S. Postal service currently faces a severe shortage in revenue and is almost certainly positioned to see cutbacks. As more readers choose to access their latest news coverage online (often at no cost), many local and indeed national newspapers in the U.S. have found their advertising and subscriptions revenues dwindle often resulting in bankruptcy. In the meantime within a decade of its existence, "google" has become a commonly used verb, "friending" someone has become an (almost) competitive sport and the blogosphere has shown evidence of layers of mutually "following" bloggers that can only be described as a rhizomatic array of mutual enchantments. And if the internet has become the base for a newly ordered public and commercial sphere (think online banking and shopping here), corollary devices that use the internet along with advanced GPS positioning technology (think Smartphones and particularly the IPhone here), have arguably made their increasingly dependent users the cyborgs that visionary theorists in the past had long anticipated.
We have seen, in short, at least in the world of the internet-connected, a "virtual" transformation of the public sphere -- a transformation as "real" as "virtual" can get. This conference seeks to examine the multiple sites of this transformation as well as the many inequities, challenges and silences that it may conceal. Our aim is to cast a wide net on a range of issues: how have digital technologies transformed our engagement with human creativity and communication? How has, for instance, our increased access to electronic texts and databases (whether through Project Gutenberg or Google Books to name only two), affected the ways in which we go about leading our lives, not only as scholars, but also as lay citizens? How have such technologies affected our notion of the "literary" and its genres? To give a specific example: how are our literary theories of the genre of "autobiography" affected by the proliferation of personal web pages and tweets? Or, to turn to a different discipline, how have art historians and other scholars of visual culture reconceptualized some of the foundational theories and methods of their field in the flurry of visual dissemination enabled by new media technologies? What, in short, are the implications and possibilities of the digital humanities? And, to what extent can digital technologies and the new media help foreground the centrality of the humanities and art to public culture and social life?
Our aim in considering the virtual transformation of the public sphere is neither to be uncritically celebratory nor to be unduly cynical. Rather, we hope to gather scholars from a variety of disciplinary and intellectual backgrounds who are interested in reflecting on these transformations and theorizing them in relation to issues of power, justice, privacy, identity, political deliberation, civic society and also of aesthetics, consumption, and pleasure.
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