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Timon Beyes, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Brown University, US)

Melissa Gregg (Intel Corporation, US)

Nishant Shah (Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany/Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India)
 

As this is an advanced course, the level of engagement with the texts and the ideas expressed in them is expected to be intensive.

Participants in the course are asked to prepare a 3-5 page paper engaging with the course materials as a means of exploring potential connections between today’s mediatic condition and their own research projects. Deadline for submission is Friday 19 June 2015.

During the course, each participant is expected to make a short (max. 20 minutes) presentation of his/her project and how it relates to the course literature. Also, we expect lively exchanges and will ask students to comment on their colleagues’ ideas.

It is a precondition for receiving the course diploma that the student attends the whole course.

The aims of our endeavour are, at least, threefold:

1.    to acquaint ourselves with, digest and discuss key writings on today’s technological condition and its effects;

2.    to reflect on the management of ‘labour’, ‘subjects’ and ‘affect’ under this condition;

3.    to relate these reflections to our own research projects and media environments.

“Media determine our situation,” Friedrich Kittler infamously wrote in his introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Although this dictum is certainly extreme—and perhaps overly dramatic—it propels us to think and explore how technological media are shaping how we live, work, communicate, socialize, organize, love, even how we sleep.

As Kittler continued in his opening statement almost 30 years ago, our situation, “in spite or because” of media, “deserves a description.” How, then, can we describe, measure, analyse and intervene in what, today, is continuously measuring, analysing and shaping us?

With regard to conventional studies of organization, management and entrepreneurship, this of course entails the ‘logistical media’ that indeed condition global trade as well as the operations of firms and bureaucracies. It also entails the accelerating boom-or-bust cycles of new media entrepreneurship. Yet we need to go further and cast our ‘nets’ wider: What is at stake here is the management and measurement of everyday life, the modulation of what is given to experience and sense perception and how our lives and bodies are affected – and thus of what we can experience and think –, the subconscious and routine habits we develop in response to all the ubiquitous tools, gadgets, applications and data streams, the way we comply and resist. What is at stake, in other words, is the question of what kinds of people we have become or wish to become, and the possibilities of collective organizing that are given to us.

This doctoral course will draw upon cutting-edge theories of today’s technological predicament, the participants’ and lecturers’ experiences and ideas as well as on real-life examples or ‘cases’. (Please note that this is a real-life that is always-already technologically mediated, so these will be cases in which our brains and bodies are implicated in some way or other.)

The three-day intensive doctoral course is hosted by the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy/OMS PhD School, Copenhagen Business School, in conjunction with the Digital Cultures Research Lab (dcrl), Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany) and the “Terms of Media” Conference, Lüneburg, June 17-19, 2015 (http://cdc.leuphana.com/events/event/the-terms-of-media/).

This is meant to become a very interactive course equally based on key texts/input lectures and the participants’ experiences, concepts and ideas.

We expect each day to begin with an input presentation by the participating faculty and invited guests, followed by an in-depth discussion of the themes and concepts at hand (to be prepared by engaging with the readings designated for each session).

However, the schedule outlined below is only an organizational tool, which we will play with, leave behind or adhere to according to the development of the course.

Day 1 (23 June): Affective labour and the machinic organization of work (Melissa Gregg)

Purpose: The ideas of productivity and time management emerging at the turn of the last century began the long process of producing professional subjectivity. Physical accomplishments and psychological engineering came together in the use of new media technologies that allowed for individual performances to be measured. This workshop traces the history of time management in the workplace back to some of its founding documents to question the ideas of productivity that today's software and hardware applications only extend.    

10.00-11.00
Introduction: Organization in digital culture (Timon Beyes)

11.00-12.30
Session 1: Subjects of Performance: Data metrics and the measurement of work (Melissa Gregg)

13.30-15.00
Session 2: Work’s Intimacy: The rise of personal logistics (Melissa Gregg)

15.30-17.00
Colloquium on ‘Distributing the Human’ with Melissa Gregg, Nishant Shah, Wendy Chun and Timon Beyes

17.00-18.00
Wrap-up

18.30-
Joint Dinner 


Day 2 (June 24): Scale, governance and data subjects (Nishant Shah)

Purpose:
With the introduction of scale-free as the new digital standard, how do we understand our existing discourses which are defined around the idea of a median and a norm?  Scale-free architecture as seen in digital social media and networks, offers a series of challenges to understanding the form, meaning and practices of the self. With a special focus on data subjects and quantified self, this workshop analyses ways in which we unpack the notions of rights, regulation and governance in the age of connected networks.

Session 1:
9:00 - 10:30 - Resisting the Scale: Of Apoerea and Absence (Nishant Shah)

Session 2:
10:45 - 12:30 - Exploring scale-free: Networks, Bodies, and Societies (Nishant Shah)

Session 3:
13:30 - 14:30 - The Individual in network governance: case-studies from e-governance project in India (Nishant Shah)

Session 4:
15:00 - 16:30 - Building scale-free models: Group exercise

Session 5:
17:00 - 18:o0 - Presentations and Discussions (Timon Beyes)

 
Day 3 (June 25): New Media, Habit and Agency (Wendy Chun)

Purpose:
What is the importance of habit to the analysis of new media?  Paying particular attention to network and big data analyses, this day will outline how new media matter most when they seem not to matter at all: when they've moved from the noteworthy to the everyday, from external devices to embodied techniques.  We will also think through habit as connection: as enabling larger social formations to emerge.

 
09.00-10.30
Session 1:  Discussion: “Introduction,” Habitual New Media (Wendy Chun)
 
11.00-12.30
Session 2: Discussion: “Chapter One,” Habitual New Media (Wendy Chun)
 
13.30-15.00
Session 3: Discussion: “Chapter Three,” Habitual New Media (Wendy Chun)
 
15.30-16.30
Student papers and discussion
 
17.00-18.00
Wrap-up (Timon Beyes)

N/A

Copenhagen Business School
Porcelænshaven 18 B
DK-2000 Frederiksberg
Room: S.023

Contact PhD Support
Katja Høeg Tingleff
kht.research@cbs.dk
Tel.: +45 38 15 28 39