our new website is at theorizingtheweb.com, please go there for the 2018 event! 

the committee is excitedly reading them. all decisions will be made this month.

register for TtW using the link above. thanks!

Theorizing the Web is back for its eighth year! The event is April 27-28, 2018 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City.

The Call for Papers is now live. If you’d like to speak at Theorizing the Web, submit here. 

Registration is now open, register here. As always, we’re pay-what-you-can.

Also, please please share this with anyone you think would be interested in submitting or attending.

We’ll announce some invited panels and speakers real soon. Thanks everyone <3

You can stream all of Theorizing the Web here:

http://theorizingtheweb.tumblr.com/2017/livestream

And the schedule is here: 

http://theorizingtheweb.tumblr.com/2017/program

In a sense, this year feels like a retrospective. Theorizing the Web began in 2011 amid the energy around “the user-generated internet,” which itself was contributing to new waves of protest, including Occupy and the so-called Arab Spring. There were debates about where this would all end up and how optimistic we should be. Now we’ve come full circle, forced to re-examine those debates and look again at an uncertain future. This year’s event happens at a time when both the messy open web and corporate social media are weaponized by shitposters and presidents. Regimes and institutions have fallen, but in their place we find uncertainty, chaos, and a global rise of authoritarianism. What’s most different today from 2011 is that we no longer have to make the case that the web is an important player in all this. That much is well understood. But what its role is, and what comes next, is not. Again, we debate over how optimistic we should be.

Welcome back to the Museum of the Moving Image and to the seventh annual Theorizing the Web. We’re delighted to again partner with the MoMI, which provides a cultural and intellectual fit beyond anything we could have hoped for. We’ve put together a two-day program that we’re proud and excited to share. The Friday and Saturday daytime sessions feature 18 panels created largely from the competitive submissions we received at the beginning of the year, and the evenings conclude with four keynotes that will take place in the museum’s Redstone Theater.

A dominant theme in the air and in the competitive submissions was how to understand a world without shared understandings. The keynotes reflect this: corporate-curated community culture, attention-grabbing journalism, government propaganda, and the politics of chaos are central concerns. They describe a social world in which technology and power are always and forever deeply mediated, and fantasies of objectivity and neutrality are fading.

As always, a million thank-yous to everyone who is attending this event. And special thanks to the organizing committee, who volunteer their labor year after year to put on this conference — we are very fortunate for and grateful of their efforts — and to the many more volunteers who help out each year to keep the event pay-what-you-want, editorially independent, and relevant. We aren’t doing any of this out of any institutional obligation, and we hope you’re not here only out of obligation, either. Instead, we’re meeting this weekend because this stuff is important, sometimes even fun, and it’s what we wake up thinking about anyway. We’re all here together because you all cared enough to come.

Have fun at the event: The web won’t theorize itself!

Nathan Jurgenson, co-founder, co-chair

David A. Banks, co-chair

PJ Rey, co-founder

the last day to register at the pay-what-you-can rate is Wednesday April 5th. after that, it’s full museum admission fees. so, register now :)

This is the last of four Theorizing the Web 2017 keynote panels. See our full program for descriptions of all our panels.

Our century has already seen its fair share of world-changing political events. The web’s role in these events is no longer in question, but the character, scope, and political valence of its influence certainly is. How social movements form with and around social media is a pressing question with still too few answers. Join Zeynep Tufekçi, who has spoken at each Theorizing the Web, as she sits down with John Knefel to discusses her new book Twitter and Tear Gas.

This Panel happens on Saturday April 8 at 7:30PM and features: Zeynep Tufekçi in conversation with John Knefel

This is the third of four Theorizing the Web 2017 keynote panels. See our full program for descriptions of all our panels.

Kompromat, disinformation, or propaganda — whether you think these are the same, different, or otherwise related, it is clear that all of them will be prominent in our lives for the foreseeable future. Examining who benefits from these media practices and how that shapes our future political environment is of primary importance. It is critical to take an international perspective, with a special focus on Russia: Has Russia’s role in the worldwide politics of disinformation been accurately described? Instead of focusing on the supposed unprecedented nature of Putin’s Russia, might there be other analogues for our current politics that provide cautionary tales for this uncertain time?

This Panel happens on Saturday April 8 at 6:00PM and features: Vasily Gatov and Adrian Chen with Rachel Rosenfelt moderating.

This is the second of four Theorizing the Web 2017 keynote panels. See our full program for descriptions of all our panels.

Fake news and post-truth, alternative facts and filter bubbles: our moment’s politics are both too chaotic and too predictably on the nose. On Brexit and Trump, journalists and experts had their expectations re ned down to a decimal point, but their odds- making produced more confusion than certainty. Meanwhile, the lack of a basis for shared knowledge has allowed hoaxes and propaganda to proliferate. We are fresh off a campaign that was run, covered, and won like a reality show. What of this chaos epistemology, a tactical approach that has long been part of web culture but is now installed in the seat of power? Do we want to strengthen knowledge-producing institutions? Build new ones? What does it mean to produce and consume news information when the very shape of the world is contested, and any fact feels impossible? We will grapple with these topics on this panel, with a special focus on the role of social media.

This Panel happens on Friday April 7 at 7:30PM and features: Tara Isabella Burton, Alexa O’Brien, Aaron Cantú, and Jay Rosen with Natasha Lennard moderating.