Overview

I gotta right to sing the blues
I gotta right to feel low-down
I gotta right to hang around
Down around the river

A one-day event that maps the depression, boredom, and loneliness that feed (and are fed by) social media platforms. Beyond fake news, our platform dependencies, miseries, and anxieties are all too real. Many feel sadness about our collective inability to change – yet cannot imagine deleting social media accounts out of fear of isolation. Platform Blues are an area of interest for multiple and varied forms of research, which intersect with our topic through critical enquiry into techno-feudalism, memes, online dating, doom scrolling, right-wing libertarian/conspiracy cultures and girl theory. Alternative ways of community organizing provide glimpses of hope, as seen in protest and solidarity movements, such as those addressing climate action, to #metoo, to Gaza. Platform blues in Australia exist, but neither strict regulation nor the melancholic dream of going offline will solve it. How can our phones become a tool of connection again? Resisting the distractions of AI eye candy, let’s address the reality of our tech-induced mental poverty.

Curators: Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam) and Denise Thwaites (University of Canberra)

Co-presented by the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, The Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance and the News and Media Research Centre (all University of Canberra) and the  (Amsterdam). This gathering of bodies and souls coincides with the one-month residency of  Geert Lovink at the University of Canberra.