Possible paper topics / fields of inquiry include (but not limited to):
Apps and the networking drive: facilitating the enactment of the loss of symbolic efficiency; assisting the force shared within the network that circulates in order to produce satisfaction despite missing the aim of grasping the desired, yet unreachable object – the setting for our activity as communicating subjects of the network. Can we connect technical objects and the constitution of subjectivity, information and feeling, data and desire, as well as organic and inorganic machines? How is the mutual circulation of apps and affects constitutive of new biopolitical assemblages in zones of work and consumption, surveillance and escape, trauma and therapy, laboratory and studio? App ‘addiction’, and habit-formation (e.i. mnemotechnics and technical prostheses, attentional forms and the psychical effects of application software).
Apps and political economy: micro-object of digital labour, virtual consumption and networked value extraction; tether to branded mobile platforms, trading- off openness, to attract developers and consumers, against profit-harvesting, from sales and surveillance; site of new pirate, hacking and jail-breaking practices; a new front line between cognitive capital and communal digitization.
Apps and trans-individuation or disassociation: the fostering and/or foreclosing of technical trans-individuation and new forms of social relations by apps; apps and the implications of ubiquitous computing and digital mediation, especially ambi-informatic ‘everyware’ (Greenfield). How might we think about the social, political and technical implications of such this movement away from open-ended/trans-individuating networks like the internet towards specific, focused, and individualized modes of computing?
