[acc-cca-l] CFP: The Need to Rename Tech

[Crystal Chokshi]

[△EXTERNAL]


Call for Proposals: The Need to Rename Tech


Editors

Crystal Chokshi (MRU) and Robin Mansell (LSE)


Link to Full Call & Submission

We ask that prospective authors read the full call and <http://bit.ly/RenameTech> complete our Google form<http://bit.ly/RenameTech>.


Project Description

This is a book about words–often metaphors coined by Big Tech–that fool us into thinking the digital technologies we use every day are beautiful, benign, and consequence-free. They’re not. As the writers in this edited collection will show, the digital tech that facilitates daily life has social, political, and climate consequences. But these consequences are concealed by reductive nouns and misleading metaphors, such as the cloud or AI (Hwang & Levy, 2015; Vlasits, 2017; Hogan & Vondereau, 2018; Wyatt, 2021), that are invoked to uphold the technology industry (Ignatow, 2003).


Each chapter in this volume will discuss a specific technology and, crucially, a move to rename it. Collectively, we aim to subvert Big Tech’s careful branding and rechristen today’s most popular technologies in ways that point explicitly to their problems. As a whole, this book will propose alternative vocabulary to technologies in the Anthropocene, emphasizing what they actually do or perform, rather than Silicon Valley notions of what people should buy.


Project Goal

Critical media and communication scholars have made many calls for new language to talk about technology (Lanier, 2010; Hwang and Levy, 2015; Gillespie, 2017; Jobin and Ziewitz, 2018; Wyatt, 2018, 2021; Boucher, 2021; Wallenborn, 2022; Chown and Nascimento, 2023). This book answers these longstanding calls.


Our approach to renaming technology, like Lakoff and Johnson (1980), is not necessarily to abandon the use of metaphor. But, like Sally Wyatt (2021), we know better than to be lackadaisical when it comes to language. Language philosophy tells us that words have the power to bring things into being (Austin, 1962); therefore, we need to be very careful with them.


Carefulness, by which we mean practicing an ethic of care, comes down to renaming—and, therefore, reframing—the technology industry and the technologies it develops in terms of what they do, not what they appear to be. We hold this conviction: what something is is what it does (Drucker, 2013; van Dijck et al., 2018; Deibert, 2020). This means that things are best understood in terms of their unfolding and their consequences, in what they do as much as what they are. As such, the essays in this volume will discuss and catalogue aspects such as processes, byproducts, outcomes, and aftermaths.


How to Submit an Expression of Interest

We ask that prospective authors complete our Google form<http://bit.ly/RenameTech>, which includes the following fields:

  *   The technology your chapter will discuss

  *   Its new name (can be tentative, but it will be helpful to show us what you are thinking)

  *   Your argument, in one sentence

  *   A 150-word synopsis


Expressions of interest are due October 6, 2023.


Please see the full call<http://bit.ly/RenameTech> for a list of other key dates.


Questions?

Please feel free to contact Crystal at cchokshi at mtroyal.ca<mailto:cchokshi at mtroyal.ca>.


**

Crystal Chokshi, PhD
Assistant Professor
School of Communication Studies
Mount Royal University
(t) 403-440-6088 | (e) cchokshi at mtroyal.ca<mailto:cchokshi at mtroyal.ca>

Mount Royal University is located on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot and the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, which includes the Siksika, the Piikani, the Kainai, the Tsuut'ina and the Stoney Nakoda First Nations. The City of Calgary is also home to the Metis Nation of Alberta, Region III.
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