The Emergence of Convergent Supersurfaces

Gothenburg.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2010 is Zizi Papacharissi, whose interest is in civic habits emerging around online media. She begins by noting the mythology of the new, which suggests that newer media can revive old democracy, the idea that technology can reconfigure public space, and the continuing public/private debate.

Contemporary democracies are characterised by a nostalgia for older forms of civic engagement, by a realisation of the limitations of representative models of democracy, by an overreliance on aggregate forms of public opinion (polls which transform nuanced opinion into yes/no responses), declining public participation and increasing cynicism about democracy. Against this, a new civic vernacular is emerging that suggests new modes of citizenship which reform older metaphors and increasingly take place in the private sphere.

The present moment involves private citizens in domains public, private and hybrid, retrofitting old habits into new media, retreating into private spaces sometimes to go public, and engaging in personal fantasies of autonomy, expression, and control.

How does the process of convergence, as described by Henry Jenkins and others, fit into this – a social as well as technological process, which operates on remixed and remixable content that blurs the lines of production and consumption, with participants making media content? Convergent media may be said to provide no sense of place, to collapse private and public boundaries, or to generate a doubled-up space in which events take place in multiple spaces at once: a multiplied space. This is a quantitative metaphor, but does not tell us enough about the quality of space, though.

One way to address this is to borrow the metaphor of supersurfaces from architecture – describing pluralised spaces which have a very light and fluid texture and sometimes afford a look into the core of the systemic space or infrastructure. Convergent supersurfaces are disjointed, reconnected, and rewoven spaces which are not heavy enough to dissolve into the systemic core of the institutions of technology. This captures both the promise and perils of technology, and weaves around the outer fabrics of conventional democracy.

This sustains a convergence of technologies, spaces, and practices, and political activity migrates to these technologically sustained architectures upon the surface of pre-existing civic structures. Five new civic habits which take place on such supersurfaces include the networked self and the culture of remote connectivity, blogging, the rebirth of satire and subversion on YouTube, social media news aggregators and the plurality of collaborative filtering, and the agonistic pluralism of online activism.