CFP: "Public Media, Private Media," May 2013

The MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS) Program and Communications Forum have issued a call for papers and panels for their upcoming Media in Transition international conference, "Public Media, Private Media," to be held May 3-5, 2013, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. This installment of the annual conference seeks to explore the tenuous and shifting definitions of public and private spheres in the context of digital media, unprecedented digital tracking, reality television and confessional journalism, and intellectual property debates - all as framed by a long history of public sphere theory. 

From the CFP:

The distinction between public and private – where the line is drawn and how it is sometimes inverted, the ways that it is embraced or contested – says much about a culture. Media have been used to enable, define and police the shifting line between the two, so it is not surprising that the history of media change to some extent maps the history of these domains. Media in Transition 8 takes up the question of the shifting nature of the public and private at a moment of unparalleled connectivity, enabling new notions of the socially mediated public and unequalled levels of data extraction thanks to the quiet demands of our Kindles, iPhones, televisions and computers.  While this forces us to think in new ways about these long established categories, in fact the underlying concerns are rooted in deep historical practice.  MiT8 considers the ways in which specific media challenge or reinforce certain notions of the public or the private and especially the ways in which specific “texts” dramatize or imagine the public, the private and the boundary between them.  It takes as its foci three broad domains: personal identity, the civic (the public sphere) and intellectual property.

Broad topics include: "the anxieties of the private" in film, television, literature, and the Internet; celebrity and the public persona; the history of private-public discourse; consumption and media spaces; virtual publics; surveillance, monitors, and media traces; internet privacy and piracy; the fate of public libraries in the era of digital services (among others).

Submissions can be emailed to mit8@mit.edu and will be accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 1, 2013 (evaluations begin in November. Further instructions can be found in the Media in Transition 8th Annual Call for Papers.