Theorizing the Web conference @ NYC

(photo by @notalyce)

It's conference month for me — this time to Theorizing the Web, last weekend in New York City. Specifically, fitting the group's un-conference feel, in a warehouse in Williamsburg.

TtW is a gathering of ridiculously smart people working on projects related to network analysis, social media, human-computer interaction, and all manner of online and infrastructure theory.

The two-day event bristled with energy and overflowed with intriguing insights. Some of my favorites:

• Karen Levy from Princeton talking about "The Myth of the End User," which included an examination of the drug Nexafed, a meth-busting alternative to pseudoephedrine products and one that advertises its pills as a "technology" (!).
• R. Stuart Geiger's presentation on "successor systems" (which included citation of one of my UCSD professor's studies of Amazon's Mechanical Turk).
• Alex Leavitt's data-stuffed presentation about "the Failure of Networked Collaboration" in a particular Reddit subgroup about the Boston bombing suspects.
• Adrienne Massanari's lively presentation on the subreddit "Shit Reddit Says" also was utterly awesome. (I'm not saying that just because she was on my thesis committee!)
• Brian Thill from BCC/CUNY delivered an extremely well-written consideration of "digital wastelands" — the ones we build for ourselves with left-open browser tabs, set-aside emails, all the things on our laptops that "become waste when they overtake us, when they become things we won't actually do." Watch for his upcoming book in Ian Bogost's Object Lessons series.
• Jay Springett's rollicking riffs about the "geopolitics of the stacks," which suggested that tech companies are operating increasingly like nation-states as "the cloud" is increasingly considered as "territory."

My own presentation Saturday morning, "Virtual Pop Stars and the Digitization of Performance" (photo above), summarized my previous research into and history of virtual pop stars.

Here's video of our panel. My presentation begins at 25:00, and I take several questions at the end of the panel. The other presenters are superb, and the topic preceding mine — "Digital Monism" by Neal Stimler & Stéphane Vial — is relevant not only to my own discussion but an overall thread to this entire conference ...