deuxlits

so i have been in montreal for the past couple of days, attending 4S. i have to say that this is a wonderful conference. i’ve met some wonderful people and have had some awesome conversations with faculty and other grad students. the highlight so far has been my conversation with susan leigh star on interrelationships and opportunities between designers and social scientists. also, she gave me a 10 minute breakdown of boundary objects which really inspired a lot of new thinking

it’s been a horrifically stimulating experience with several themes coming up. to no surprise issues of open source, participation, collaboration, and sharing have been some cross cutting themes. this in and of itself is of no surprise, however there have been real variations in the approaches that people take to this issue. what’s been particularly interesting is the critiques of web 2.0 issues and most of them have focused primarily on questions of privacy and surveillance. i don’t know if this is a particularly north american POV, however i was surprised by the lack of critiques from a political economy perspective in terms of labor and ownership, which was an overriding theme from the new network theory conference back in july.

my panel on forgetting went well. julie cohen did a fanstasic job of summing up and responding to all of our presentations. in case you were wondering, mine was trying to frame the debate on sex offender in terms of a convergence between cultures of data capture and surveillance. i identified several themes in light of this convergence and tried to establish corollaries from a forgetting  perspective. regardless, this project is still in development stages and hopefully will be more flushed out as the months progress.

alright. to fulfill this month of canadia-mania, i’m off to aoir in vancouver!