Time and programme will follow.
Connecting to the masses is critical for the success of any movement, resurrection, protest, and revolution. The communication mechanisms for this connection have some times evolved and other times undergone revolutions of their own. Since the Russian centennial, scholars have examined how media and communication affects this connection to the masses in a double yet complimentary dynamic: how governments connect to the masses and how masses connect to their governments.
Therefore, we invite participants to debate this relationship and the strategies and lessons of "connecting to the masses", in light of the development in media, technology and communication strategies over the last century. Potential questions include:
Areas the conference addresses are the following:
- Evolution of propaganda: From leaflet bombs to Twitter
- Artificial attention, political packaging and the so-called attention economy
- Tactical media and tech activism in the 20th and 21st centuries
- Strategies and lessons for the use of ICTs in mobilization
- Impact of technology on revolutionary social change in the macro-perspective
- Revolutionary-era media and communist rhetoric and transition to post-communism
- Mediated contestation, surveillance, censorship and systems of control
- From journalism to social media gatekeepers
- Spheres and systems of political deliberation
- Evolution of the ownership of means of communication, processes of labour reproduction in the media, culture and communication industries
- (R)evolution of technology at work, digital labour, alternative production models
- Intelligence and cyberespionage in the 100 years span.
- Technosocial infrastructures and the politicization of health, illness and biopolitics.