Today, the Communication Networks & Social Change (CNSC) research group has done an open seminar to present the researches of its Visiting Scholars Eloy Caloca Lafont (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico) and César Alcázar Arellano (Universidad del País Vasco, UPV/EHU):
Facebook and the technopolitics of the visible: the case of the 2018 Mexican elections
By Eloy Caloca Lafont
Social networks have become key spaces of political contention. Most approaches to Facebook in social sciences address the exchanges of content, practices, and capital that take place in the platform, but there are few studies attending to the technopolitics of their algorithms and the patterns of visibility they generate: otherwise, what can be seen (or not) in the platform. With that, they outline a politics of the visible, a distribution of the sensible (in Jacques Ranciere’s terms). The ongoing empirical research presented in this talk, that analyzes the case of the 2018 Mexican elections, proposes a double technopolitical approach: on one hand, it systematizes the multiple layers, dynamics and actors involved in the Facebook assemblage and, on the other hand, analyses the connection between algorithms, visibility patterns and modes of subjectivation.
On the relevance of a political economy of the digital space
By César Alcázar Arellano
The flow of information and the ideas that circulate and constitute the digital space are rooted in a material dimension crossed by power and economical-political relations determinants. Therefore, it is necessary to question the specificity of the material structure of the digital space and its relation to power. In this talk, César Alcázar addresses the question of what critical political economy can provide a heuristic framework for conceptualizing this issue.
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