Theorizing the Web 2011

Along with the Cyborgology editors and few other colleagues, we are throwing a conference on April 9^th called Theorizing the Web. Leading up to the event, we will occasionally highlight some of the events taking place. I will be presiding over a paper session titled “Wiki-Knowledge—Populist Epistemologies from the Web” and present the four abstracts below. The aim of this paper session is to explore emergent communities of knowledges, their epistemologies, and the impact of the knowledge economy that is being created and has been created on the Web and social media. Each of these papers address different knowledges and epistemologies, ranging from the perceptions of the Internet and it uses to the meaning of post-expertise in the era of Web 2.0.

First, Katy Pearce will present a paper on Armenian conceptualizations of the Internet and the Web. What will be emphasized her is the meaning of the Internet and the Web is based not on just individual preference but is both culturally and device-bound. Next, Avelet Oz explores the contradictory tendencies of Wikipedia’s legal consciousness and its ideological practices: Wikipedia’s attempt to set a cultural schema and organization of objectivity while keeping the system open to the lay public to encourage participation. Third, Kyle Reinson presents the intriguing case of post-expertise in the era of Web 2.0, which describes the potential shift of power relations that may result from the challenge of emergent businesses and social media organizations. In effect, the rise of said businesses and social media organizations offer individuals access to information and services at little or no cost that was previously held and distributed by experts in a particular knowledge community. Last, Sally A. Applin will present a paper written with Michael D. Fischer that specifically focuses on the dynamics of knowledge creation on Web 2.0 and how this new practice of knowledge formation challenges authority of experts by rendering such information available to the mass public.

Find the four abstracts below. Together, they will make for an interesting and informative panel for anyone interested in knowledge production and epistemologies. We invite everyone to join us at the conference in College Park, MD (just outside of Washington, D.C.) on April 9^th. And let’s start the discussion before the conference in the comments section below. Thanks! more...

Habermas argues that a healthy public sphere can only grow from a relatively autonomous private sphere.  The maintenance and development of this public sphere is of prime importance to the health of an open society, but this era may be passing.  The development of online social networks challenges the integrity and usefulness of a distinction between the public and private spheres.  Perhaps this distinction is imploding, with future civic  and commercial life simultaneously public and private, populated by cyborg citizens.  The private sphere is now public in many important ways.

Analysis of Facebook affords the opportunity to negotiate the contours of this historic transition, the opportunity to find empirical evidence and conceptual nuance to develop much needed social theory.  This panel will explore transformations in personhood, privacy, property, justice, capital, commerce and other foundational issues; issues which are of obvious importance beyond Facebook’s 500,000,000 users. more...

In 1983, Time magazine ran a cover story called “The New Economy,” in which economists and social thinkers posited that America’s transition from a heavily industrial economy to a technology-based economy would lead to an entirely new kind of marketplace. This new economy was at its most baffling and unknown in the late 1990s, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, when we witnessed an entirely new meltdown of this entirely new type of economy.  Today, we find ourselves in yet another new economy, one with a plurality of actors, values, and marketplaces, a plurality facilitated by the ubiquity of the Internet. These are the new economies of the Web.

I am pleased to be presiding over “The New Economies of the Web,” an open paper session at the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference on April 9^th. Here, we present three scholars who theorize the nuances of these new economies, and in so doing, allow social science to take important steps toward understanding the contours of this new and largely uncharted territory. more...

PJ: First, begin by telling us the title of your installation. Then, please give brief description of what you are trying to accomplish and of the mechanics behind it.

Ned: The title of the installation is “Public/Private,” which refers to the increasingly public nature of our private data. On a daily basis we offer up intimate details of our lives to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Myspace. It’s really amazing how much we’re willing to share with strangers over the internet, and how it can wind up being profitable in some cases and damaging in others. What I want to achieve with this installation is a visual distillation of that.

The heart of the Public/Private is a website that displays a twitter feed and a set of images pulled from the content of that feed. Twitter is the perfect venue for this because of its hashtag feature which allows users to search for given topics, and anyone who knows the hashtag can participate. The code for the installation takes that data and uses Google Images to search the words in the tweets, in essence taking them completely out of context. The most important part of the search to me is the “anything goes” mentality; there’s a size filter on the image results, but otherwise it displays the first image from that set of results. Sometimes it’s humorous, other times it’s gross or offensive. For example, in the testing phase for this project, I tweeted the phrase “some of the weirder art related stuff is falling into place”. The image result for the word “falling” was an icon image of a man falling from the World Trade Center in NY on September 11. This is the sort of random association I wanted, because at the end of the day, anything you say in a public forum can be taken out of context. more...

The fundamentally political nature of the Internet is currently asserting itself with a directness and an insistence that has rarely been seen before now. But, again, the nature that is asserting itself is fundamental–it is not a new aspect of the Internet, but has been part and parcel of it since its inception. The panel over which I have the pleasure of presiding, “Augmented Engagement – Global Politics by Digital Means”, focuses on this aspect. It examines how the technological roots of the Internet’s past have helped to shape the role it plays in modern politics, as well as what is considered both possible and appropriate in the Internet as a political space. The Internet as public space is also held up for analysis, both in terms of its nature as a space in which political action can be performed, and in terms of the actors who perform within that space. Political actors obviously perform political acts, and some entities may regard those acts as threats and risks–threats and risk may be understood as cultural constructions, and those constructions are affected and shaped in turn by the technological environment in which they exist. Finally, the Internet is examined as political space in which political actors understand, mediate, construct, and maintain identities, and form communities around the identities that they construct and maintain, as rapid flows of both people and information across national borders become more and more commonplace.

Ultimately, what unites all of the papers on this panel is the way in which they address modern global politics as an augmented phenomenon–a kind of politics in which the line between the digital and the “real” is quickly vanishing, if it ever existed at all. Actions, actors, and meanings online and offline become so fluid and so deeply intermeshed that, as Nathan Jurgenson has written on this blog, the concept of “digital dualism” becomes a fallacy, a framework for analysis rendered useless by its inability to capture the richness of the subject. In global politics as they are practiced now, “online” and “offline” can no longer be understood separately–they must be addressed as aspects of a complete picture situated within the long history of humanity’s engagement with technology. These papers make powerful contributions to a deeper understanding of that picture. more...

New communication technologies have enabled users to overcome barriers of time and space in a variety of ways. And while much of the current literature focuses on newer technologies such as social network sites, people have been using the Internet for support-based purposes for decades. Howard Rheingold was one of the first writers to highlight this affordance of the Internet in his early account of the WELL. He writes:

Because we cannot see one another in cyberspace, gender, age, national origin, and physical appearance are not apparent unless a person wants to make such characteristics public. People whose physical handicaps make it difficult to form new friendships find that virtual communities treat them as they always wanted to be treated – as thinkers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, not carnal vessels with a certain appearance… (Rheingold, 1993, p. 26).

It is this feature of the Internet that helps facilitate the deep and intimate relationships that characterize cyber-support. One of the most positive outcomes associated with Internet communication, cyber-support encompasses a wide variety of behaviors and sites that enable users—often unknown to each other except through their onsite interactions—to provide information and support to each other about shared experiences.

The four papers included in this panel reflect the diversity of cyber-support and point to a number of positive outcomes that can be derived from these uses, ranging from empowering women to forming deeper community bonds.

• Stephanie Vineyard considers recent events in Egypt and Tunisia in her paper, “Technology and Social Capital: How new media tools give opportunities to women.” Employing a social capital framework, Vineyard explores how Internet technologies can give women in disadvantaged regions of the world the power to find and connect with other women like them and rise above many of the location-based restrictions imposed on them by current governmental systems.

• Nick Violi focuses on community-based support in his paper, “Motivation for Participation in Online Neighborhood Watch Communities.” Using an experimental method, he explores motivations to join a neighborhood watch social network site, “Nation of Neighbors” and finds that invitations to join such community may be most successful when they focus on altruistic motivations rather than egoistic, collectivist and principlist aspects of the community.

• Exploring how women prepare for their wedding day, Sara Martucci studies LIWeddings.com, a wedding planning site that features a forum for women to share their questions, joys, and frustrations related to their upcoming nuptials in her paper, “‘The Most Important Day of Your Life:’ Friendship and Support on an Online Wedding Forum.” Using content analysis and interviews, her study supports previous work by Nancy Baym (1998) and highlights the benefits these sites provide in the form of support and camaraderie.

• Ishani Mukherjee brings light to the lives of South Asian immigrants and transnationals in her paper, “My Husband Doesn’t Know I’m Blogging: In Search of Safe Spaces Online.” This study employs the theory of intersectionality to examine South Asian community blogs on domestic violence and makes suggests as to the positive role these blogs may serve in helping women to share their stories with other victims of violence and comes to terms with their split identities.

Abstracts for each of the papers are listed below. Please join us at the conference in College Park, MD (just outside of Washington, D.C.) on April 9^th to join in the conversation on this and many other topics related to the social impacts of technology. more...

There will be a special event the evening before Theorizing the Web at the important intersection of theory and art. Admission is open to all and is free of charge.

When? This Friday, April 8th, 6:30P
Where? Irvine Contemporary Gallery, DC, 1412 14th St NW
Why? Art plays a prominent role on this blog and also with this conference. The media-prophet Marshall McLuhan argues (see 10:58 in this video) that only the artist has the “sensory awareness” to tell us what our changing world is “made of.” While many of us are not willing to go this far, it very well might be the case that artists are uniquely prepared to give insight on this new, augmented reality that social media and other new technologies are creating. In a sense, artists sometimes precede theorists and academia. And in this spirit, Theory Meets Art literally precedes Theorizing the Web.

We begin with a brief performance by ambient musician Yoko K. Then, we will screen a feature film that we feel should be centrally important for thinkers on technology, art and society. The film is a Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning documentary called We Live in Public that chronicles the story of one Josh Harris while also making important theoretical points about privacy, publicity, capitalism, identity and much more through the lens of art. For more on the film, see my review in a recent edition of Surveillance and Society. After the film, we will have a discussion on art and social media with world-renowned street artist Gaia. The night will be hosted by Dr. Martin Irvine, who is giving a talk on street art and social media on Saturday. Last, there will be a social reception at the gallery.

We are very excited to start this conference at this wonderful gallery in the heart of DC. Away from the concrete spectacle of downtown, the gallery is situated in a beautiful section of the city, a short subway ride from College Park. We encourage everyone to come to this event and begin a wonderful weekend of Theorizing the Web! more...

As social media continues to become integrated into our daily lives, various aspects of human experience have found novel forms of expression online.  In this panel, the sixth spotlighted for this weekend’s Theorizing the Web conference, four researchers discuss how emotion is variously communicated, interpreted and experienced on the internet, and what these changes portend for our understandings of self and the social world.

By suggesting that the much-abused “weak ties” formed through social networking online may actually lead to a natural form of solidarity, Lisa Sanders turns much of criticism of Web 2.0 on its head; comparative ethnographic work done by Andrea Baker analyzes the dynamics involved in forming strong social communities online, including the factors conducive to emotional bonding; Meghan Rossatelli explores how expressing affect online structures our understanding of emotional experience; and Tamara Peyton discusses how the ubiquity of the “Like” button is changing what was once understood as a personal emotion into a public declaration that becomes subject to social scrutiny and capitalist exploitation.

Read the abstracts below the break for a fuller preview of the talks and come by Saturday at 9:30 to join the discussion. more...

Panel members’ research and stories take us across and beyond assumptions or claims that social media have isolating effects or reduce intimacy, or that they train psyches to reside in virtual spaces removed from embodiment. Instead these particular “augmented encounters” add rather than subtract embodiments, multiply intensities of affect and its meanings, and complicate political intersectionalities across media, together with identity formations.

Multimodel communication and transmedia storytelling are forms of transdisciplinary research here, both objects of analysis and ways of sharing analysis. They include projects addressing

• transnational migration and connection across space and race,

• rape discourse standards across media platforms with implications for communication across worlds,

• queering the normativities of computer code embodiments for an augmented critical study of codes, and

• exploring how the techno-organic social worlds of college students are pressured into and by these very multimodel communications.

The abstracts for the panel includes: more...

This is the fourth panel spotlight for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference on April 9th. I’ll have the pleasure of presiding over a panel that focuses on how mobile web platforms are augmenting the world of bricks and flesh. Much more than an ethnography of Foursquare, this panel will explore our changing relationships to space and place, and the new ways public and private spaces are opening up as a result of this new augmented reality.

PJ and Nathan have done an excellent job on this blog of  articulating social media’s role in times of revolution, but this panel seeks to understand social media’s roll in a variety of instances. We will explore the cultural contexts that Social Networking Services (SNS) operate within, and what this does for old and new associations with (and within) place and society. From San Francisco hipsters to Chinese political activists, and from your local Starbucks, to the Second Life, social media is changing how we interact with our cities and our fellow citizens.

If anything unites these four panelists, it is their balanced perspective on the roll of digital media. Its easy to essentialize mobile computing platforms, or mistake computer mediated communication as anti-social. Without essentializing the technology, or romanticizing the past, these authors provide a balanced critique of what is happening in our cities and online. Read the four abstracts after the break  to learn more:

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