The Network Social Abstraction: for a Genealogy of the Computational Social Sciences | Professor Tiziana Terranova

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• Professor Tiziana Terranova (Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Italy)
• Thursday 02 May 2024, 17:30-19:30
• McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College, Bene't Street (next to the Eagle pub).

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This talk considers the rise of the computational social sciences as a correlate of the subsumption of the Internet under the Corporate Platform Complex since the 2010s – and the corresponding transformation of the definition of social computing from the production of software as social tool to “the ability to process the content generated by social interaction and feed the results of that processing back into the system” (T. Eriksson). As a result of this shift, we have witnessed the re-configuration of the social as a form of secular abstraction inaugurated by the eighteenth century moral philosophers’ imitation of the methods of the natural sciences (M. Poovey). The talk addresses some of the crucial elements in the genealogical formation of the modern social and the political and cultural implications of the rise of contemporary forms of social computing.

About the speaker: Tiziana Terranova is Professor in Cultural Studies and Digital Media in the Dipartimento di Scienze Umane e Sociali at the Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Italy. Her research interests concern the general intersection between science, technology, communication and culture from the perspective of critical theory and cultural studies. She is the author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press, 2004); After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common (Semiotexte/MIT Press, 2022) and the forthcoming Network Social: on the Return of the Social in the Post-Digital Age (Minnesota University Press). She is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Theory, Culture and Society (Sage), Media Theory, Subjectivity (Palgrave), and Studi Culturali (Il Mulino). She is also a member of the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies at L’Orientale, and co-founder of the Critical Computation Bureau (CCB), and of the Centro di Ricerca Interuniversitario sulle Tecnoculture Transnazionali (CRiTT).

If you have specific accessibility needs for this event please get in touch via comms.events@cdh.cam.ac.uk and we will do our best to accommodate any requests. The talk will last for around an hour and a drinks reception will follow.

This talk is part of the Cambridge Digital Humanities series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cambridge Digital Humanities
• McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College, Bene't Street (next to the Eagle pub)

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