AoIR 2017 is the 18th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, a transdisciplinary gathering of scholars interested in the place of networked technologies in social processes. This year’s conference is hosted by the University of Tartu, Estonia.
Networked publics play an important role in shaping the political, social, economic, cultural but also moral, ethical and value-laden landscapes of contemporary life. In spite of – or perhaps because of – the emergence of digital technologies and platforms, the concept of a single, overarching public sphere has remained not only an unreachable ideal, but also, for many, an uncomfortable ideology. Scholars have been crafting many different, sometimes conflicting conceptualisations of ‘publics’ – from affective publics through personal publics to algorithmic publics, and from ad hoc publics through issue publics to platform publics (and beyond) – while activists have been crafting publics by building new digital spaces for expression, engagement, and protest.
AoIR 2017 will provide an opportunity to discuss the emergence of networked or digital publics, and their possible role in re-constituting the public sphere.