In a sense, this year feels like a retrospective. Theorizing the Web began in 2011 amid the energy around “the user-generated internet,” which itself was contributing to new waves of protest, including Occupy and the so-called Arab Spring. There were debates about where this would all end up and how optimistic we should be. Now we’ve come full circle, forced to re-examine those debates and look again at an uncertain future. This year’s event happens at a time when both the messy open web and corporate social media are weaponized by shitposters and presidents. Regimes and institutions have fallen, but in their place we find uncertainty, chaos, and a global rise of authoritarianism. What’s most different today from 2011 is that we no longer have to make the case that the web is an important player in all this. That much is well understood. But what its role is, and what comes next, is not. Again, we debate over how optimistic we should be.
Welcome back to the Museum of the Moving Image and to the seventh annual Theorizing the Web. We’re delighted to again partner with the MoMI, which provides a cultural and intellectual fit beyond anything we could have hoped for. We’ve put together a two-day program that we’re proud and excited to share. The Friday and Saturday daytime sessions feature 18 panels created largely from the competitive submissions we received at the beginning of the year, and the evenings conclude with four keynotes that will take place in the museum’s Redstone Theater.
A dominant theme in the air and in the competitive submissions was how to understand a world without shared understandings. The keynotes reflect this: corporate-curated community culture, attention-grabbing journalism, government propaganda, and the politics of chaos are central concerns. They describe a social world in which technology and power are always and forever deeply mediated, and fantasies of objectivity and neutrality are fading.
As always, a million thank-yous to everyone who is attending this event. And special thanks to the organizing committee, who volunteer their labor year after year to put on this conference — we are very fortunate for and grateful of their efforts — and to the many more volunteers who help out each year to keep the event pay-what-you-want, editorially independent, and relevant. We aren’t doing any of this out of any institutional obligation, and we hope you’re not here only out of obligation, either. Instead, we’re meeting this weekend because this stuff is important, sometimes even fun, and it’s what we wake up thinking about anyway. We’re all here together because you all cared enough to come.
Have fun at the event: The web won’t theorize itself!
Nathan Jurgenson, co-founder, co-chair
2087
stormborns
yousharknotpass
annaxmalina
discoholicmusic