Piotr Cichocki
Electronic Cohabitation / Digital Collaboration
A profound change is about to take place, one spanning daily life and global political processes, and announced by media researchers over thirty years ago. The change will question the very core of such categories as local culture, cultural identity or space of culture. It has become blatantly obvious that developments on other continents affect our daily reality. Our political communities, neighbourhoods and individual consciousnesses have been incorporated into economic, ecological and political transformations spanning the globe.
New digital media are a significant – though by no means exclusive – component of aforementioned change. As it turns out, they are more than an information channel providing us with news from the other side of the planet, for example. They are also spaces and tools of co-existence and collaboration. Websites have become venues for hostile cohabitation – and alliances for taking action to make the world a radically better place.
We will be thinking and talking about collaboration in the space of the Worldwide Web, wherein representatives of assorted placed and communities work together by choice or from necessity, basing on multiple habitus and work methods. Examples of such actions include the “1000Hz” music production label I am head of, associated with ethnographic research across East Africa. The label publishes and promotes works by artists of the region, all communication between us handled by electronic platforms.
The group Help refugees in Lithuania, Poland and Belarus is a yet another and terrifying current example. Families of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Yemen use the group to try and contact individuals engaging in rescue and salvage operations in Poland.
The next example involves an array of broadly defined activities organised under the shared tag Extinction Rebellion (XR). In the nebula of virtual groups and face-to-face meetings, XR stands for assorted forms of collaborating to reverse the climate disaster.
In the course of the workshop, we will ponder successive spaces of collaboration and cohabitation.
