Futuresonic 2008
Futuresonic brings 500 opinion formers, futurologists, artists, technologists and scientists from the digital culture, music and art communities to Manchester for four days of seminars, workshops and events.
At the heart of the Futuresonic festival is the internationally-acclaimed Futuresonic conference, and its focal point the Social Technologies Summit, which looks at how technologies can create an extension of social space or support group interaction, and asks how we can make technology more social.
Submissions are now invited to the Futuresonic conference and the Social Technologies Summit. Proposals for talks, presentations and workshops plus also session themes are invited. Submissions of innovative formats for social interaction are encouraged.
Online, Mobile and Unplugged Social Networking
The Futuresonic conference is a place where important international discussions take place. The conference will bring together leading figures to unpick the hype around the latest technological zeitgeist, broaden the debate, and propose and explore a critical understanding of social technologies.
The 2008 conference will explore the theme of The Social – Online, Mobile and Unplugged Social Networking. Submissions are invited that explore the new social spaces and the social implications of technologies for the many different kinds of people who make, use and are affected by them.
Computers have become social interfaces for sharing digital media and collaborating to build online communities and folksonomies. Social technologies create an extension of social space, and new ways for people to find the stuff that interests them, link up with others, and share. They include tools and applications that enable people to connect, share and interact, such as blogs, instant messenger, social software such as Flickr, FaceBook and Jaiku, and even the internet itself. ‘Social technologies’ can also refer to technologies created and maintained by social networks, such as communities of developers and users working collaboratively with open source tools.
What distinguishes social technologies is that they are bottom up and many-to-many instead of one-to-one or one-to-many. They can be seen as a part of a major cultural and social shift. And yet at the same time we also see how electronic communication can isolate us, as more and more people drown in a deluge of email that generates stress, even reducing IQ – puncturing the rose-tinted view that life is ‘more social.’ Additionally, ‘online communities’ are based upon an artificial equivalence between ‘users’ which obscures power relationships and issues of ownership.
Deadline: 5pm, Tuesday 18 December 2007.
