[-empyre-] Social Media Use across Campaigns for Social Justice

[Renate Ferro]

Dear David, and John,

Your critiques of Ricardo's post seem unfair to me. Your claim that
all social media is problematic and that artists who work through
these platforms in a critical way seems to provide little leeway.  The
point of an artist using any tool (and social media is a tool) as a
means to make a critical engagement is what artists have been doing
for years.

Are you saying that social media is evil and that therefore we as
artists need to find other tools?  Is all digital bad so therefore
artists need to go back to the analog methods of the canvas, paint,
pencil, and paper?

It is very difficult for me to imagine that this is what you intended.
Where would you then position this very list serve -empyre?

Renate Ferro

Ricardo writes:
> While the research and scholarship you present is extremely important to
> consider
> and to understand. It also assumes that artists and activist have no
> critical awareness of these issues of power above all things or below all
> things (of algorithms or robots), and I think this wrong.  - we have never been utopian about technology or imagined the power and computing in the 20th century would be or become platforms of justice or concern. But we also did not want to fall into the no-waynout zone of the apocalyptic-that seems to some degree at play in your scholarship.





-- 
Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art,
(contracted since 2004)
Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office:  306
Ithaca, NY  14853
Email:   <rferro at cornell.edu>
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net

Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/