ASWA is extremely pleased to announce that the Annual Wilson-Locke Lecture will be given by Associate Professor Crystal Abidin, Principal Research Fellow & ARC DECRA Fellow, Internet Studies and Programme Lead of Social Media Pop Cultures, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University.
This Lecture promises to be thought provoking and absolutely current. Find out more about the work of Professor Abidin.
Lecture Title: Internet celebrity, Refracted publics, and the Frontiers of social justice cultures
Abstract: Reflecting on a decade of research on internet celebrity and social media pop cultures in Singapore, the Asia Pacific, and beyond, this talk considers the potential of 'below the radar' studies for understanding the fast evolving and growing potentials of subversive, risky, and hidden practices on social media, especially in the realm of social justice pursuits. The talk offers the framework of 'refracted publics' to consider how influencers and internet celebrities on various platforms are involved in circuits of (mis)information ecologies, and their innovative strategies of communication, amplification, and suppression of youth movements. Refracted publics are vernacular cultures of circumvention strategies on social media in response to both analogue and algorithmic vision and access. They have been mobilized to avoid detection, promote deflection, and facilitate the dissemination of specific messages away from or toward target audiences. They are a product of the landscape of platform data leaks, political protests, fake news, and (most recently) COVID-19, and are creative vernacular strategies to accommodate for perpetual content saturation, hyper-competitive attention economies, gamified and datafied metric cultures, and information distrust. The key conditions (transience, discoverability, decodability, and silosociality) and dynamics (impactful audiences, weaponized contexts, and alternating publics and privates) of refracted publics allow cultures, communities, and contents to avoid being registered on a radar, register in misplaced pockets while appearing on the radar, or register on the radar but parsed as something else altogether.
Date: Wednesday 10 November 2021
Time: 6.30pm
Where: The Left Bank, 15 Riverside Road, East Fremantle - upstairs at The River Bar
Cost: $10 members, $15 non-members - book tickets via the Register Now link below. A selection of food from the Left Bank menu will be provided. You can buy drinks from the bar.
Book Online: https://www.registernow.com.au/secure/Register.aspx?E=45101