FIRST IN A SERIES OF BIENNIAL CONFERENCESABOUT THE POLITICS OF DIGITAL MEDIA

THE INTERNETAS PLAYGROUNDAND FACTORY

NOVEMBER 12–14, 2009AT THE NEW SCHOOL, NEW YORK CITY

www.digitallabor.org

The conference is sponsored by

Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts andpresented in cooperation with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design, Yale Information Society Project, 16 Beaver Group, The New School for Social Research, The Change You Want To See, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York University’s Councilfor Media and Culture, and n+1 Magazine.

Dear all,Welcome to Eugene Lang College The NewSchool for Liberal Arts for the

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rst event ina series of biennial conferences about thepolitics of digital media.This inaugural conference, The Internet asPlayground and Factory, alerts us to thefact that hundreds of millions of peoplecontinuously make the totality of their lifeenergy available to a handful of businesses.At this international event about 100activists, lawyers, media scholars,anthropologists, artists, activists, students,programmers, historians, and social mediaexperts come together to reevaluate freelabor, play, and pleasure in an economy thatis increasingly driven by the expropriation of online sociality.One aspiration of this conference is tooffer an accessible analysis of the ways inwhich people are used—from traditionallabor markets to the Internet. Most peoplewho are active users of social networkingservices are not aware of the ways in whichtheir attention is captured and their datatracks are collected, analyzed, and sold.Many speakers will investigate the changingsites of speculative and actual

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nancialvalue creation. In response to the awarenessof patterns of expropriation, they will point toa few starting points where we can tangiblypoliticize our lives.Beyond dreams of refusal of Internetcultures we propose support for dataportability, decentralization, Free and OpenSource Software, peer-created and ownedpublic media, and alternative businessmodels that do not merely strive for thebiggest pro

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t. If we better understand thegranularities of today’s labor we will be ableto discuss the lives we may lead tomorrowwith more con

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dence.Two prelude events have set the stage forThe Internet as Playground and Factoryconference.

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“Changing Labor Value”

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at theVera List Center for Art Politics discussedthe changing meaning of labor in the digitalera. The second event,

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“CrowdsourcedLabor: Digital Democracy or CentralizedSweatshop?”

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took place at The Change YouWant To See Gallery.Moving forward, the next conference in thePolitics of Digital Media series, The Internetas Playground and University, will be heldat Eugene Lang College in the fall of 2011.It will focus on a novel kind of participatorymedia literacy that underwrites students forthe commons. A preparatory event in April2010 will focus on the death of

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lm schooland the rebirth of screen education.In 2013, the third conference in the series,The Internet as Barricade and Soap Box,will focus on media activism outsidethe United States and Europe. Internetcultures have radically internationalizedover the past

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ve years. English-languagecontent no longer dominates the Web.The digital divide is not what it used tobe. The Internet is not accessible to thevast majority of people in economicallydeveloping countries, these populationshave a larger density of mobile phones thanthose in the overdeveloped world.Enjoy the presentations and discussions,make new friends, tweet, blog, catch up withcolleagues, start a collaboration, have aglass of wine, dance, walk through New YorkCity at night, and stay in touch with us hereat Eugene Lang College.Trebor Scholz