Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the effects of social media on citizen attitudes about democracy in Latin America.

Paper long abstract:

We plan to use survey data from Latino Barometer to explore the implications of Internet use, and social media use in particular, on political opinion in Latin America, arguing that the effects are largely contingent on the level of government filtering of the Internet. We will frame this argument in the equalization/normalization literature where these two camps have argued, respectively, that the Internet is either going to serve as a democratizing force or its influence is simply going to be harnessed by the existing power structure limiting its capacity to serve as a democratizing force. Our preliminary results suggest there is a relationship between both Internet use generally and social media use in particular and citizens' attitudes about the condition of democracy in their respective country. Those who use the medium more frequently are more likely to be exposed to dissident information and as a result tend to feel less favorable about the conditions in their country. We suspect that this effect is smaller in those countries with higher filtering. To test this proposition we will estimate separate models for those countries with high filtering versus those with low filtering using Freedom House data to measure the level of filtering.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will set out the contours of an interdisciplinary approach to recent webdocumentaries (webdocs) from Brazil, particularly those which focus on urban issues including housing and forced evictions, and the 2013 protests which took place in the country.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will set out the contours of an interdisciplinary approach to recent webdocumentaries (webdocs) from Brazil, particularly those which focus on urban issues including housing and forced evictions, and the 2013 protests which took place in the country. Both of these themes relate to long-standing inequalities and tensions in urban Brazil as well as to more recent processes of social and urban change, including specifically the preparations for the upcoming World Cup (2014) and Olympic Games (2016) to be held in Brazil.

Although there is a long tradition of documentary filmmaking in Brazil and scholarship on this topic, this paper proposes that as elsewhere in the world, recent developments in digital technologies have occasioned changes in the processes, forms and user experience of documentary (Dovey and Rose 2013) in the country. One feature of webdocumentary in Brazil has been the involvement of groups, collectives and social organisations in the production of documentary material for dissemination on the internet. As well as film studies, it is therefore necessary to draw on scholarship on digital culture when researching Brazilian webdocumentaries. This is particularly the case in an interdisciplinary study aiming to consider the content of webdocs (as 'texts') alongside an analysis of the practices involved in their production, circulation and reception, by producers and audiences, including on video-sharing websites (such as YouTube and Vimeo) and social network sites (such as Facebook and Twitter). Drawing on work on circulation by Brian T.Edwards (2011), the aim is develop an approach to webdocumentary which is sensitive to both 'motion' and 'meaning'.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines formal and community digital initiatives in Medellin, Colombia. It focuses on how communities suffering from the effects of violence have utilized technology to prevent violence and map human rights. It explores the use of digital by the state as a tool of social transformation.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past 10 years, Medellin has been transformed by the Integrated Urban Project with the promotion of digital culture as a key feature

This paper will explore the convergence between formal and community digital culture. It will examine the Medellín Ciudad Inteligente strategy arguing that formal digital policy is a vehicle for the promotion of social and economic prosperity and a means of rebuilding relations between the state and civic society.

Digital culture has emerged in the barrios of Medellín as a response to the legacy and continuing violence. The paper will examine the work of Ciudad Comuna, a community media organization in Medellin. The organization uses digital technology as a means of violence prevention, to challenge mainstream media reports in the community and to monitor and raise awareness of human rights abuses. The organization provides an interesting example of the appropriation of digital culture in marginalised community suffering from the effects of violence and displacement.

In exploring formal and community digital culture in Medellín, the paper will conclude that there is an uncomfortable nexus between the two. Digital policy has been advanced as a means of promoting social well-being and economic prosperity. Notwithstanding the appropriation of technology by the community as a response to the effects of violence serves as an awkward reminder that the state is failing to fulfill its role of uphold law and order and justice

Paper short abstract:

A través de la ponencia presentaré el proyecto Palimpsesto de México, crónica en varios planos temporales y geográficos sobre la Ciudad de México.

Paper long abstract:

Palimpsesto de México, cuyo título rinde homenaje al libro emblemático de Fernando del Paso (Palinuro de México), es una propuesta en la que la ciudad es vista no sólo a partir de su su recreación histórica y contemporánea por escrito, sino también --y principalmente-- a través del reflejo que México proyecta a partir de su plasmación en imágenes fijas y en movimiento y de los sonidos que produce cotidianamente. En esta crónica multimedia se combinan diversas técnicas y plataformas digitales con una escritura cronística experimental.

Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the relationship between offline place and online interaction in the work of Latin(o) American cultural producers, including examples from Uruguayan Brian Mackern, the Chilean project Memoria histórica de la Alameda, and Latino artist Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages with one of the central questions that has arisen in internet studies in recent years: the relationship between offline place and online interaction. As user-generated content has grown exponentially, and as a wealth of applications now allow users to refer to their geographical location, add geo-coordinates to their photographs on online platforms, or link content to online maps, amongst many others, the internet is increasingly offering ways of allowing people to make important connections to, and re-affirm their affiliations to, their physical, offline location. This paper engages with this dynamic, and focuses on the work of Latin(o) American cultural producers, investigating how, in their online works, they engage in re-imaginings of and representations of offline place. Taking examples from Uruguayan Brian Mackern's 34s56w.org, the collaborative Memoria histórica de la Alameda by participants in Chile, and Latino artist Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga's Vagamundo, the paper explores how offline struggles for the control of and meaning of place are re-enacted and re-shaped online. The paper contrasts the approach of these three works, exploring how in some cases, online-offline interaction is used to question earlier periods of dictatorial power, whilst in others, it is the interrogation of the workings of late capitalism that comes to the fore, as the artists confront the new configurations of power under late capitalism, its structural inequalities, and the waning of the nation-state in the face of the increasing powers of transnational corporate capital.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how one particular tactical media project, Mexican Fran Ilich’s possibleworlds.org server, positions itself with respect to traditional revolutionary discourse in Latin America, focusing in particular on its use of Digital Zapatista poetics.

Paper long abstract:

The discourse of revolution has arguably been the most obvious (and needy) subject of reinvigoration and/or resemanticisation in online cultural production, both because of the proven ability of networked digital media to bring about social change and because of the tendency to refer to both social and technological change with the same terminology. In this paper I briefly explore the association of Latin America, and by extension discourses of Latin American-ness, with the concept of revolution, before going on to examine how one particular tactical media project positions itself with respect to the Latin American revolutionary tradition. The cultural producer in question is itinerant Mexican media artist and activist Fran Ilich whose work to create a utopian online community via his own possibleworlds.org server is directly related to the ethos and practice of (Digital) Zapatismo. Although difficulties abound in the creation of contestatory projects online, my paper argues that Ilich's tactical media work does manage to retain a contestatory edge: despite its sometimes naïve reliance on the tradition of Latin American (and global) revolutionary discourse, my reading recognises Ilich's work as employing a poetics of Digital Zapatista 'semantic disruption', thereby offering a way of appreciating its more subtle and innovative aspects.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the work of Venezuelan artist Érika Ordosgoitti by showing how it uses performance, photography and online platforms to engage critically with notions of authority, authorship and the image.

Paper long abstract:

The authority of the art institution and the notion of authorship, traditionally legitimise art as a discourse of exceptionality and expertise whose value exceeds the realm of everyday communication. While in the twentieth century, performance, conceptualism and Institutional Critique posited critical approaches to the materiality and legitimation of art, today the Internet is used to produce and circulate art beyond its conventional remit. This context informs this paper's analysis of the work of Venezuelan artist Érika Ordosgoitti in order to focus on how it foregrounds issues of authorship and authority by using the Internet to make the work permeable to collective co-production and reproduction. Ordosgoitti's spontaneous naked appearances in urban spaces in Caracas and the photographic documentation of these actions that she publishes on her Facebook profile and blog, expose the work to external factors beyond the artist's control. Her body serves as a stimulus for controversy, comments and insults triggered by the photographs in order to stage a real-time demonstration of shifting and plural constructions of photographic meaning, which displaces authorship and the referent as the determining factors in establishing signification. Simultaneously, however, the work problematizes the idealization of the Internet as a permissive and horizontal platform by re-exhibiting the censorship of the photographs and highlighting its panoptical presence via automated algorithms that seek out nudity to erase it. In short, Ordosgoitti's work intentionally expands and contracts the conditions set out for apparently plural meanings to reveal power relations that converge on art, its circulation and reception.