Professor Stephen Barley of Stanford University will give the annual Derber Lecture on his book "Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy." The book tells the story of how the market for temporary high-tech professionals operates from the perspective of the contractors who do the work, the managers who employ them, the permanent employees who work beside them, and the staffing agencies who broker deals The lecture will commence at 9 a.m. on April 29th at the School of Labor and Employment Relations (calendar entry).

It will be followed by an evening discussion panel also including Prof. Barley (see flyer attached below) on the topic of "The Future of Work, Technology, and Organizations." The discussion panel will be held on Thursday, April 29th from 5-6 pm in 217 Illini Union.

These events are coordinated by the School of Labor and Employment Relations and co-sponsored by The Illinois Informatics Initiative, The Leadership Center, Interpreting Technoscience (a CAS initiative), and the World of Work.

InfoStructure Lecture
Swedish Pirates, Anonymous Trolls, and the Outlines of an Internet Politics

Julian Dibbell
George A. Miller Visiting Professor, College of Media

The Piratpartiet

Abstract:
Repurposing the technology critic Langdon Winner's famous question "Do
artifacts have politics?", this talk asks: Does the Internet? And if
so, what do those politics look like? Two case studies suggest themselves: That of the Swedish Pirate Party (an officially registered political party built almost entirely on a platform of radical copyright reform) and that of Project Chanology (an entirely informal protest movement targeting the Church of Scientology). Last year I published a feature article in Wired magazine about Project Chanology, and I am currently in the midst of reporting an article on the Pirate Party for the New York Times Magazine. I'll talk about what I've learned about these two movements and about what they imply for the shape and limits of Internet-based political change.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Coordinated Science Laboratory, B02
1308 W. Main St. Urbana, IL

CAS Technoscience Lecture
Ludocapitalism: Real Money from Play Economies, and How I Made It

Julian Dibbell
George A. Miller Visiting Professor, College of Media

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 4:00 pm
Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum
600 South Gregory Street, Urbana

Video/audio streaming posted later here.

designmatters Lecture Series
The LOLcat, the/b/tard, and the Well-wrought Urn : Internet memes as distributed design

Tuesday, March 9 at 5:30pm in the Siebel Center Auditorium
Room 1404, Siebel Center 201 N. Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801

[The first of two Julian Dibbell events this month related to the InfoStructure group.]

ABSTRACT
From Rickroll to Fail blog to Numa Numa guy, the ephemeral bits of textual and visual culture known as Internet memes have taken up residence in the margins of our online lives and will not go away. This talk attempts to understand why, outlining the rudiments of a basic memetic literacy and exploring the social and aesthetic practices that bring memes into existence, keep them in circulation, and make them so improbably compelling.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Julian Dibbell is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and technology journalist who specializes in information technology. He is a contributing editor for Wired magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Le Monde, TIME, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Details, The Nation, and many other publications. His 1993 article for the Village Voice, “A Rape in Cyberspace,” is the most cited, reprinted, and assigned essay ever written on identity and the Internet. In 2004, he co-founded the game research collective Terra Nova. Jullian Dibbell is George A. Miller Visiting Professor at the College of Media and the Center for Advanced Study of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during Spring Semester 2010.

ABOUT THE SERIES
Designmatters3 is a lecture series to promote design thinking that integrates design, business and technology in the creation of innovative products, services and experiences. Organized by the School of Art + Design, sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Colleges of Engineering and Fine and Applied Arts; School of Art + Design, Technology Entrepreneur Center; College of Business, Department of Human Factors, Autodesk. and the MS in Technology Management Program.

All designmatters3 events are free and open to the public.

For more information - Contact: Traci Pines: tpines@illinois.edu

Information In Society Speaker Series

Mon, Feb 22 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Ted Striphas, Indiana University
GSLIS Room 126

Lecture Abstract:

This presentation focuses on the Amazon Kindle e-reader's two-way communications capabilities on the one hand, and on its parent company's recent forays into data services on the other. Dr. Striphas argues that however convenient a means Kindle may be for acquiring e-books and other types of digital content, the device nevertheless disposes reading to serve a host of inconvenient - indeed, illiberal-ends. Consequently, the technology underscores the growing importance of a new and fundamental right to counterbalance the illiberal tendencies that it embodies - a "right to read," which would complement the existing right of free expression.

Speaker Biography:
Ted Striphas is Assistant Professor and Director of Film & Media Studies in the Department of Communication & Culture, Indiana University. He is author of The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (Columbia University Press, 2009) and its accompanying blog.

Dr. Ted Striphas is speaking as part of the "Information in Society" speaker series.

Dr. Striphas will also be available for lunch and informal discussion from 12:00-1:30 pm in 242 LIS Building. Contact Linda Smith if you have questions or to let her know you will attend the lunch. Lunch will be provided for the first 10 participants.

InfoStructure Lecture
Horses, Cell Phones and Masks: Rethinking Infrastructure through Mobile Telephony in Mongolia by Dr. Lisa Parks, Professor and Chair, Dept. of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara.

Thursday, February 25, 6:30-7:30M
Public Lecture: B02 Coordinated Sciences Laboratory
1308 W. Main Street on the UIUC campus (Main & Mathews)

Abstract:
While Thomas Friedman contends in The World is Flat that digital technologies have equalized or “flattened” differences in the world, I remain convinced that enormous variations and disparities remain to be described and analyzed. Media infrastructures are certainly not the same all over the world: they are amalgams of old and new systems, relics of various stages of capitalism and/or socialism, involve both bodies and machines, and have different histories and uses. They are embedded in different patches of earth, operate at various scales and speeds, and serve different populations. Drawing upon a range of materials such as infrastructure diagrams and footprint maps, press reports, interviews with corporate executives, and ethnographies of mobile phone operators, I discuss a particular arrangement of public wireless telephony in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar that emerged during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Situating this practice in relation to post-communist conditions and the history of transportation and communication in the region, I explore how Mongolian public wireless telephony represents a significant infrastructural innovation that employs a new class of workers, combines the collectivist ethos of communism with aspects of digital capitalism, and reinvents nomadic practices in urban space.

Bio:
Lisa Parks, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Her research explores uses of satellite, computer and television technologies in a transnational context. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005), and co-editor of Planet TV (NYU, 2003) and Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007). She is currently writing two new books: Coverage: Media, Space and Security after 911 (Routledge) and Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies. She is also co-editing the book Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP) with James Schwoch. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Screen, Television and New Media, The Journal of Visual Culture, and Geoforum, and in edited collections such as Residual Media, Documentary Testimonies, Television After TV. Parks is the director of the Global Cultures in Transition research initiative for the Center for Information Technology and Society at UCSB.