5 / 658
3
KL 03
Cables, cameras and other fossils: media pasts andmedia futures
Joanna Zylinska
1
1
University of London, Goldsmiths, London, UK
My talk will adopt a media-ecological perspective to explore parallels between biological extinction and technical obsolescence. Its argument will be an‑
chored in the notion of“media fossils”: remnants of our media history that will continue long into a posthuman future as discarded techno-trash, materials
decomposing in the air, soil and oceans, as well as cosmic debris. Through an exploration of various sites of media present and media past, I will offer a
mediation of, and a meditation on, our human relation to devices that we create and discard, on the desire for new products that fuels so-called innovation,
and on the politics, ethics and aesthetics of waste. My method here will be that of an amateur geologist-philosopher-artist, one whose process involves
an affective-material excavation of the past mixed with a textual and visual speculation about the future. It will differ therefore from the more brazen
exploratory pursuits, in which (predominantly male) media archaeologists and geologists thrust their probes into deep time across cosmic scales, offering
a God’s eye view of the universe’s geological, biological and art-historical strata. My project will be much more modest in scope in that it will offer what
Donna Haraway has called a“view from somewhere.”Tentatively described as“shallowmedia geology,”my excavatory quest will lead me to several localized
material and conceptual fossil sites in search of various media pasts – and media futures.
KL 04
Platforms and publishers: coming to terms with a newdigital media environment
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
1
1
University of Oxford, UK
What does the continued, global rise of platforms like Google and Facebook mean for public communication in a new digital media environment, and for
how we research and understand public communication? That is one of the central questions facing the field of communication research today. In this
lecture, I examine the relationship between publishers and platforms as one key part of how the rise of digital intermediaries is playing out, and show how
news media—like many others—are becoming simultaneously increasingly empowered by and dependent upon a small number of centrally placed and
powerful platforms beyond their control. As a range of different intermediaries including search engines, social media, and messaging apps become more
and more important in terms of how people access and find information online, and in turn restructure the digital media environment itself, communication
research is faced with a set of interlocking questions concerning both our intellectual work and our public role.The intellectual questions include the need to
understand how people use these platforms to engage with public communication, but also institutional questions including how different platforms en‑
gage with other players (like publishers) and how these other players in turn adapt to the rise of platforms, as well as political questions concerning the im‑
plications of their rise. The question concerning our public role concerns how existing ways of doing and communicating communication research fits with
our ability to understand—and help others understand—an opaque and rapidly-evolving set of processes profoundly reshaping our media environments.
Friday, November 11
1 1 : 0 0 – 1 2 : 3 0