Panel organizers:
Ico Maly (Tilburg University): I.e.l.maly@tilburguniversity.edu
Tom Van Hout (Tilburg University): Tom.VanHout@tilburguniversity.edu
The algorithmic platforms and technologies that vie for our attention have reconfigured how we produce and consume digital culture. They make sure we are entertained, informed, distracted, dazzled, polarized, surprised, persuaded, provoked, depressed and lure us into affective states. They teach us how to live our lives, how other people lead theirs, and how life could also be. They monitor, quantify and monetize how we use data. We wrangle, subvert, resist and avoid them. Understanding the effects of digitalization and datafication means understanding how we construct our identities and cultures using such platforms, how they attempt to direct the cultural politics of everyday life and how we thus interact with digital media as we go about our daily lives.
This panel invites researchers to address the relationship between attention economies and digital culture through the prism of discourse studies. In keeping with the conference theme of ‘Contemporary societies in digital discourses’, this panel examines how attention economies enable, amplify and constrain platformed ideologies, collectivities, imaginaries and identities.
This panel welcomes empirically grounded contributions that show how and what social action is accomplished when social, political and/or aesthetic identities are performed online. We expect relevant contributions to explore digital cultural practices from a variety of analytical approaches such as mediated discourse analysis, social semiotics, multimodality, and linguistic ethnography. We welcome other participants to join this panel with their contributions and look forward to pooling our interests and insights with the aim to publish the papers presented during the panel.
