Erin Rose Glass: Writing in the Age of Alienated Intelligence: How to Hack the Hidden Value of our Words
Surveillance capitalism has entered the academy! As this new economic logic permeates our writing and communication technologies, digitally-mediated academic writing represents at once two forms of intelligence: the academic intelligence as intended by the author, and an alienated form of intelligence about that author to be mined, analyzed, instrumentalized, and indefinitely archived by IT companies in their quest for the accumulation of capital.
While this alienation may seem to have no bearing on our intellectual processes, Erin Rose Glass argues that it constitutes an “invisible discipline” that “teaches” the academic community to passively accept digital technology as neutral and inevitable. Such passivity not only contributes to the broader normalization of surveillance capitalism but also freezes our capacity, as academics, to explore exciting new intellectual, social, and political possibilities for our academic writing technologies and practices.
In this talk, Glass offers a framework for thinking about writing in an age of alienated intelligence and discuss a variety of ways academics can hack our writing tools, practices, and information capital to generate new forms of intellectual community and processes. To demonstrate this approach, she will discuss experimental projects including Social Paper, #SocialDiss, and KNIT R&D that attempt to demonstrate the exciting potential of reclaiming and redirecting the alienated intelligence of our academic communities.
Erin Rose Glass is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at UC San Diego, where she facilitates the Digital Humanities Research Group. Her work focuses on using digital tools and social practices to make education and knowledge production more democratic, collaborative, and publicly engaged.