The digital landscape is ever changing with the constant development of new technologies, the never-ending emergence of trends and hypes running their cycle, the ongoing building and rebuilding of infrastructures, and the permanent renegotiation of power distributions. Accordingly, the study of (post-)digital media cultures requires constant conceptual and empirical updates, that should, however, be sensitive to the multilayered histories of digital media technologies as well as their own discourses.

Exploring contemporary developments in digital cultures the workshop of the working group »Data and Networks« of the German Association for Media Studies (Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft) will discuss vital aspects, current developments, emerging topics and future challenges of our contemporary media technological situation. The main focus of the workshop is to open up a space for extensive discussions. Therefore, the contributions will be circulated beforehand among participants.

• Thursday, February 15, 2018
  • 13:00:13:30     Welcome
  • 13:30-15:00     Session 1
    • Real-Time Streams: Metaphorical Imaginations and Temporalities                                                                     
                       Mathias Denecke
    • Weather or Not: On Digital Clouds and Media as Environment
       Tim Othold
  • 15:30–17:00     Session 2
    • The Network Is not the Territory: Mobile Addressability and the Capture Model of Data Acquisition
                                                             Florian Sprenger
    • Privacy Assistants: Challenges and Critique of Evolving Concepts of Privacy in Ever-Changing Computing Environments
                        Martin Degeling, Jasmin Degeling
  •  17:30–19:00     Session 3
    • Semi-Smart, Sovereign Chronological Chains of Existence: The Blockchain Model                                                                   Oliver Leistert
    • Noisy Internet! Web journalism as an epitome of the Internet’s acousticness
                                                                                                Bernhard Dotzler and Solveig Ottmann 

• Friday, February 16, 2018
  • 09:30–11:00     Session 4
    • The Role of Software Tools in Critical Data Studies Practices: The Affordances of Gephi as a Sociotechnical System
                          Daniela van Geenen
    • In the Middle of Things: Media Theory and Algorithmic Criticism
      Marcus Burkhardt
  •  14:30–16:00     Session 6
    • From Bodily Fluids to Facehuggers: The Evolution of Cryptovirology
                                                                                              Mary Shnayien
    • Life Functions Critical
                                                                                 Uwe Wippich
  •  16:30–18:00     Session 7
    • The Paranoid Machine: Five Challenges to Digital Cultures
      Clemens Apprich
    • TBD (late arrival)
                                                                                        Armin Beverungen
    • AI and the form of capital: Preliminary notes on the media culture of artificial intelligence
                                                                 Jens Schröter and Christoph Ernst
•  Saturday, February 17, 2018
  • 10:00–11:30     Session 8
    • Social Encounters with Symbiotic Technologies
                                    Bianca Westermann
    • TBD (late arrival)
                                                                                       Serjoscha Wiemer
  •  12:00–13:30     Next Steps and Wrap Up

The reader for the workshop will be provided upon registration via email to Marcus Burkhardt (marcus.burkhardt@uni-siegen.de).