Presider: Matthew Kirschenbaum

Participants:

  • Andrew Hare (@ahare), “The YouTube War: Wikileaks, Warfare and The New Digital Politck”
  • Donghee Yvette Wohn (@arcticpenguin), “Crystallization”
  • Sam Han, “The Digital Milieu of Online Christianity: The Folding of Religious Experience into Sociality”
  • Thomas Geary (@tmgeary), “Electracy and Digital Agency: How Attainable Are They?”

Abstracts are provided below:

Andrew Hare (@ahare), “The YouTube War: Wikileaks, Warfare and The New Digital Politck”

On April 5, 2010, Wikileaks, the Swedish-based global government and corporate watchdog group, posted a 39 minute video online of a Bagdad airstrike carried out by the U.S. military.  The actual airstrike occurred almost three years earlier on July 12, 2007 and killed 12 people, including two civilian reporters.   Once posted the video quickly became a viral sensation and held the top spot in Google search for an entire week.   On YouTube, a 17-minute abridged version of the video reached over 6.5 million hits in less than a month.

On its surface the classified helicopter cockpit video document becomes a disturbing symbol for the careless, destructive nature of collateral damage in an Iraqi war going on for the better part of a decade. The video suggestively titled “Collateral Murder,” led U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates to publicly denounce Wikileaks for releasing it and said the lack of context is like “looking at war through a soda straw.”

Regardless of any overtly political reading of the video, the Wikileaks footage demonstrates a demonstrative shift in our contemporary relationality and overall understanding of warfare.  The first-person shooter perspective and raw footage quality to the digital artifact represents perhaps the most extreme transformation yet of warfare moving from the ideological plane of physical presence, to the emerging digital plane of mediation. In particular, the maddeningly complex asymmetric technowars fought in Iraq and Afghanistan can be understood almost exclusively through quasi-communicative signs inside a new digital politick. This new understanding is inchoate and ambiguous as the visual system of raw digital information allows for a wider range of interpreting war as an event apathetic and empathetic, banal in both its masochistic or political proclivities.   However, whatever the interpretation of the sign of the digital politick, a shift in civilian understanding towards deeper abstraction and spectacle is certain.

Ultimately, I believe our Western collective conception of war itself is being transformed by digital technologies and is allowing for war to take on meaning via a radically new set of discourses that define a communications framed at an intersection of politics, media and pop-culture.  The digitized war on YouTube can be seen as mediation further abstracting war away from notions of authenticity, activity and physical space. The communications of new media instead allow war to be viewed as a digital simulation, a spectacle of terror, a new visibility and a pseudo-event.  I will analyze these key theoretical communications issues using the example of the Wikileaks Baghdad airstrike video as the model for a newly maturing political discourse rooted in digital media that could potentially alter how we perceive the very fundamentals of war itself.

 

Donghee Yvette Wohn (@arcticpenguin), “Crystallization”

The notion that reality is not objectively “out there” but instead socially constructed is a longstanding philosophical debate dating back to the 1800s. With the introduction of mass media in the early 1900s, scholars began to argue that mass media contribute to our understanding about reality—from Lippmann to Gerbner, researchers have suggested that the media subjectively shapes what people view as reality.

Distribution of media, however, has drastically shifted with the introduction of the Internet. Although social networks have always been influential in shaping what we perceive as being important, social media such as Facebook and Twitter are making our networks more salient.

In this media environment, we suggest Crystallization Theory as a new framework for understanding the social construction of reality in the age of social media. Crystallization Theory builds on social influence theory, which purports that people have a fundamental desire to tune their attitudes towards groups that they want to affiliate themselves with.

Amidst the sea of information, social media facilitates information produced by the members of our social networks, who become neo agenda setters. These neo agenda setters filter information from major media outlets and introduce information that one would otherwise not be familiar with. Since people are influenced by members of their social network, we will see patterns arise where people’s perception of reality will crystallize through their social networks and everyone will perceive that the information their social network produces reflects mainstream news, but there will be no true mainstream.
Although we don’t want to present a technologically deterministic view, it is important to acknowledge that when information is being distributed digitally, computer algorithms may play a large role in terms of what information is presented to the individual. This poses different concerns for mainstream media sources and social network sources.

In the case of mainstream sources, in the golden age of paper newspapers, the most important news was placed on the front page, and one could tell by the layout of the paper (in terms of headline size, columns dedicated) how important the news was. In television news, the most important news was reported first. The format of the news enforced mainstream media’s agenda setting abilities.

On the Internet however, these dynamics slightly change. Although the mainstream media still has some control in terms of which articles are presented on the main page of their website, there are other elements on the website that reflect the most popular news, such as “most emailed article” or “most-read article.” Since these statistics are generated by computer algorithms, the more these algorithms are introduced into the page, the lesser the role of the agenda setter becomes. However, as individual users, we do not know if these algorithms are indeed automatically generated based on user activity and they are vulnerable to manipulation by hackers. Thus, what individuals perceive to be important news because it appeared as “most-read article” may actually not accurately reflect user activity.

With social media, there is a different problem where the visibility of information about one’s social network relies on the algorithms of the social network site operator. For example, Facebook has certain algorithms that selectively show the status updates of one’s Friends. Although we can presume that Facebook shows status updates of people we communicate with more, we don’t really know what criteria Facebook is using. Although individuals can certainly choose to look at all of the information their network is producing by clicking on individual profiles and such, as we are increasingly seeing social media use as a default rather than an option, the algorithm Facebook uses in constructing one’s News Feed may have a large impact on what information individuals actually absorb, especially for users who have low technological expertise. In this case, sites such as Facebook may even become a third-level agenda setter.

 

Sam Han, “The Digital Milieu of Online Christianity: The Folding of Religious Experience into Sociality”

This paper examines the relationship of religion and digital media technologies as it is in evidenced in “Internet campuses,” an emergent phenomenon in mostly evangelical, tech-savvy Protestant churches. These campuses hold worship services at a specific URL and contains their own graphical user interface that includes video and chat, its own pastoral staff and, crucially, meets strictly online. Internet campuses also make great use of social networking, especially Facebook, and uses social media as not only an extension of the fellowship of the church lobby variety but also for high-contact pastoring and ministerial contact.

I suggest that today, Christian churches that utilize the Internet in this way form what I call a “digital milieu,” which is founded upon the coexistence of religious participation and sociality. I propose that the lobby, where the fellowship occurs, and the sanctuary, where worship occurs, are both remediated in contemporary online churches. I do so by first presenting a sustained discussion of the online churches, wherein I provide a phenomenological analysis of a particular digital milieu, LifeChurch.tv, whose use of social media is acute. I look specifically at its Church Online, Facebook page, and its microsites (e.g., its blogs). I then move onto an analysis of the discourse of Christian-oriented, technology magazines and blogs centered on online worship and online churches. This will allow us to analyze, albeit via proxy, the Christian response to the advent of online churches in its full diversity. Thus, I suggest that online churches’ digital milieux have effectively redefined extant ideas of religious community and religious experience. Specifically, drawing on the work of French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, I argue that a major consequence of the ever-growing intimacy of Christianity and the World Wide Web is that religious experience and religious community have folded into each other, with the experience of the online milieu of religion is becoming sociality itself.

Therefore, in showing the religious use of technology or the latent “theology of technology” in these churches and the “religiosity” of everyday technological practice, I aim to enter into recent debates on modernity, secularism and secularization in the sociology of religion on two levels. On the one hand, I wish to trouble the narrative of modernity that largely perceives technology, as a simple proxy of science, and therefore primarily an instrument of “disenchantment.” Contrary to this argument, I suggest that the particular relation of new media and religion that we see today has allied them even further. On the other hand, I wish to move away from the epistemological tension between religion and science that is assumed in many discussions of secularization in contemporary sociology, which effectively excludes technology as an area of focus. Moreover, I wish to make specific contributions to the understanding of the basic categories of the study of religion, including “religious experience,” “community,” and “sacred space.”

 

Thomas Geary (@tmgeary), “Electracy and Digital Agency: How Attainable Are They?”

In Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy, theorist Gregory Ulmer describes how in today’s digital zeitgeist, one’s understanding of and facility creating within electronic media has become an alternative to orality and literacy. Ulmer labels this digital literacy as electracy. One who is electrate possesses the skills to competently navigate, create, read, and analyze in the digital realm, whether it is a Web site, a social network, a multimodal Flash project, a virtual world, or computer software. Knowing historical context and the implications of working within each medium are important factors in determining one’s electrate knowledge. Yet electracy does not require an architectonic knowledge of computers, languages, hardware, and codes. User interfaces for Web site creation tools (i.e. Wix, Blogspot) and social networks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter) simplify editing for users. Anyone can blog or develop a digital persona in a few clicks and minimal maintenance. Can the average Web user, which safely describes most of the general public, claim an electrate knowledge if he or she does not possess the knowledge to work outside of the basic interface options provided? In this presentation, I would like to explore how much digital media knowledge one must possess in order to be labeled electrate. If I regularly use Twitter, do I simply need to know how the social network functions or must I also know how and why developers construct its Web interface? Since not all software, Web sites, or operating systems are open source, does the average user have the agency to become fully electrate or is he or she interpellated – “always-already subjects” according to Louis Althusser – in any digital space?

In this postmodern Web 2.0 world, the question of how one fosters rhetorical agency has become relevant and exigent. Modern rhetorical theorists, often in reaction to Michel Foucault and Althusser, have “allowed agency to wither away in the shadow of structuralism and relativism,” contends Dana Cloud. The Alliance of Rhetoric Societies expressed a “permanent anxiety” about rhetorical agency, which to some is merely illusory and to others greatly weakened by the interplay of media, audience, and context. Communications scholars have analyzed how to form engaged communities and/or promote agency – traditionally defined as political action and good citizenship but increasingly seen as the capacity of the rhetor to form meaningful action – in cyberspace through institutionalization, Web blogs, hacking, and ethnic media; no one, however, has satisfactorily responded to the dilemma posed by Cloud: how do we gain agency – and similarly electracy – in a postmodern world? Are they unattainable? Does they require immersion in a discourse community and classical Marxist solidarity as Cloud proposes? On the Internet, would this mean regular participation in digital native communities such as API groups? Or is this quite simply being an informed denizen of the Web, reading RSS feeds and popular Web sites that pertain to that piece of electrate knowledge? This presentation will analyze these questions of electracy and agency and how scholars can help promote electracy and digital agency in our pedagogy for today’s digital natives.

Presider: Ashlee Humphreys

Each session in this panel deals in some way with the transition from a traditional mode of production—one in which goods and services are produced by a company and then transferred to the individual user—to a new(er) mode of production here users participate in the production process. This idea, variously called co-creation, co-production, prosumption, and produsage, is increasingly useful for describing phenomena ranging from citizen journalism to customizing one’s Nikes. The papers in this session approach the topic—and this I’m happy to see—from a perspective that views co-production as a process embedded in and integrated with previous institutional structures.  They also seem evenhanded when evaluating the consequences of such a shift—neither overly utopian nor dystopian.  After all, the question will at some point receive an empirical answer, thus outmoding our high-minded predictions.

First, Jacob Landis will discuss the democratization of news production, and examine the integration of integration of traditional mass media with ‘crowdsourced’ information and other forms of citizen journalism with traditional media sources. Second, EunRyung Chong looks at the emergence of global public sphere that has been facilitated by electronic communication and discuss the implication of this for self-identity. Third, Jonathan Albright will examine co-production via participatory mediation—the use of audience response as a filter for curating news content.  Lastly, Chetan Chawla will discuss coproduction as a management strategy, theorizing the firms’ transition from forms of manufacturing-based economic organization to new, service- and information-based forms of value-creation.

 

Jacob Landis (@jakelandis), “Phases in the Crowd: How Traditional Media Outlets Can Best Use Crowdsourced Data”

Journalism, traditionally, has been defined by the medium through which it is published; Large institutions, scarce due to the cost of publishing but able to reach massive audience were the sources of news. Today, through new technology, scarcity is gone. On the Internet, everyone can publish.

At the intersection of “everyone can publish” and “only large institutions deliver news” a new concept is emerging. Information can now be gathered and curated by traditional media institutions from multiple individual publishers at low cost and high speed.

This gathering practice is crowdsourcing, the “use of technology to foster unprecedented levels of collaboration and meaningful exchanges between people from every imaginable background in every imaginable geographical location.” Twitter, a leading technology in the real-time deliver of information from millions of individual sources, provides numerous case studies of traditional news institutions using crowdsourcing to supplement their reporting.

Considering Twitter’s increasing role as a source of real-time information, how can traditional media outlets best use crowdsourced information from Twitter to supplement their own reporting, parsing out fact from rumor?

This thesis suggests that information created by the aggregation of a diverse, independent, decentralized crowd of individuals can be used by traditional media, but only if traditional media does not impact these conditions before collection. The aggregation of the information under these conditions can provide an emergent point of view, previously unseen by any one party.  This emergent point of view is a new resource for traditional media outlets, one that, when correctly curated, can tell a story more quickly and more informatively than previously possible.

 

EunRyung  Chong, “Globalization and Web 2.0 in the Network Society”

It is widely acknowledged that “consciousness of the world as a whole” has been made by modern communicative media such as newspapers and Television. Likewise, “virtual neighborhoods” which are not bounded within territorial borderlines seems to emerge by connections of international computer networks. Recently, it has been argued that new Internet applications such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter  facilitate the emergence of a global public sphere. In the paper, I will evaluate the implications of newly emerging communication media systems such as mobile phones and Web 2.0 applications in the context of globalization. In particular, 1) self-identity in the Web 2.0 and “produser” 2) emergence of global public sphere 3) network locality in the Web 2.0 environment will be discussed.

The self has been considered an organizing principle of global informational societies. In the process of forming self-identities, locally contextualized individuals influence global social incidents with the consequences and implications of their acts. While no agreement has been made about the precise definition, recently emerging Web applications such as Wikipedia, You Tube, Facebook and Twitter are collectively called Web 2.0. These applications have more open, collaborative, and participatory characteristics. The vast majority of content of Web 2.0 applications is provided by users. Users and producers are not considered separate identities in the Web 2.0 environment. The shift of roles between producer and user of the self is only varied over time and across tasks. In this regard, Axel Bruns suggests the hybrid concept of self as “produser.”

Barry Wellman argues that the developing personalization, wireless portability, and ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet all facilitate networked individualism as the basis of community. In addition to that, Manuel Castells claims the possibility of a global public sphere and global civil society in this personalized and ubiquitously connected network. He premises that international, conational, and supranational issues cannot be solved by nationally-based political systems alone. Recent examples of the movement of public global sphere which use Web 2.0 applications can be found in Anti FARC rallies in 2008 on Facebook. FARC is a Colombian military guerilla group which frequently commits kidnapping and murder for political purpose. Anti FARC rallies, which are confirmed 100,000 people in 165 cities around the world on February 4, 2008, were mainly organized by Facebook groups.  In sum, Anti FARC rallies by Facebook groups demonstrate the potential of globally networking people power which is supported by Web 2.0 applications.

While it is widely admitted that the mobile communication and individualized information networks decrease the significance of place, the substantive nature of physical space in the context of globalization has not been denied. On the one hand, traditional local groups including families and friends have restructured their communication networks with electronic media. Family members living in different countries can use electronic media such as Facebook, Skype in order to feel a “connected presence,” although it is an imagined proximity. On the other hand, geopolitical issues are still in service while the need of global interdependence for solving world problems is increasing.  Both trends demonstrate the substantive nature of physical place of communicators cannot be disregarded even when technological information means guarantee the deterritorialized communication. Considering the significance of place, Eric Gordon suggests the concept of “network locality” in current globalized communication systems. In this concept, Gordon attempts to wed ubiquitous individualized communications network to the place or the local. He argues that local situations cannot be out of the influence of physical space, however, the structures and boundaries can be restructured by the flow of information.  Because of the connectivity of mobile communication system, people can store their information in placeless global networks such as Facebook, Flickr, and You Tube instead of individual local drives on a personal computer. When people put their information on global framework, their specific location does not add any meaning or modification to themselves. However, the information which people place in the global network contributes the local knowledge to the global information network. In this regard, “space of information flows” and “space of places” do not replace each other.

To conclude, the importance of human actor as “produser”, placeless ubiquity, mass-to-mass communication, interaction between local knowledge and global information network call for the attention that substantial nature of globalization should be studied in the context of Web 2.0 environment.

 

Jonathan Albright (@nzews), “Participatory Mediation: audiences as meta-cast filters for online news content”

It is widely acknowledged that “consciousness of the world as a whole” has been made by modern communicative media such as newspapers and Television. Likewise, “virtual neighborhoods” which are not bounded within territorial borderlines seems to emerge by connections of international computer networks. Recently, it has been argued that new Internet applications such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter  facilitate the emergence of a global public sphere. In the paper, I will evaluate the implications of newly emerging communication media systems such as mobile phones and Web 2.0 applications in the context of globalization. In particular, 1) self-identity in the Web 2.0 and “produser” 2) emergence of global public sphere 3) network locality in the Web 2.0 environment will be discussed.

The self has been considered an organizing principle of global informational societies. In the process of forming self-identities, locally contextualized individuals influence global social incidents with the consequences and implications of their acts. While no agreement has been made about the precise definition, recently emerging Web applications such as Wikipedia, You Tube, Facebook and Twitter are collectively called Web 2.0. These applications have more open, collaborative, and participatory characteristics. The vast majority of content of Web 2.0 applications is provided by users. Users and producers are not considered separate identities in the Web 2.0 environment. The shift of roles between producer and user of the self is only varied over time and across tasks. In this regard, Axel Bruns suggests the hybrid concept of self as “produser.”

Barry Wellman argues that the developing personalization, wireless portability, and ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet all facilitate networked individualism as the basis of community. In addition to that, Manuel Castells claims the possibility of a global public sphere and global civil society in this personalized and ubiquitously connected network. He premises that international, conational, and supranational issues cannot be solved by nationally-based political systems alone. Recent examples of the movement of public global sphere which use Web 2.0 applications can be found in Anti FARC rallies in 2008 on Facebook. FARC is a Colombian military guerilla group which frequently commits kidnapping and murder for political purpose. Anti FARC rallies, which are confirmed 100,000 people in 165 cities around the world on February 4, 2008, were mainly organized by Facebook groups.  In sum, Anti FARC rallies by Facebook groups demonstrate the potential of globally networking people power which is supported by Web 2.0 applications.

While it is widely admitted that the mobile communication and individualized information networks decrease the significance of place, the substantive nature of physical space in the context of globalization has not been denied. On the one hand, traditional local groups including families and friends have restructured their communication networks with electronic media. Family members living in different countries can use electronic media such as Facebook, Skype in order to feel a “connected presence,” although it is an imagined proximity. On the other hand, geopolitical issues are still in service while the need of global interdependence for solving world problems is increasing.  Both trends demonstrate the substantive nature of physical place of communicators cannot be disregarded even when technological information means guarantee the deterritorialized communication. Considering the significance of place, Eric Gordon suggests the concept of “network locality” in current globalized communication systems. In this concept, Gordon attempts to wed ubiquitous individualized communications network to the place or the local. He argues that local situations cannot be out of the influence of physical space, however, the structures and boundaries can be restructured by the flow of information.  Because of the connectivity of mobile communication system, people can store their information in placeless global networks such as Facebook, Flickr, and You Tube instead of individual local drives on a personal computer. When people put their information on global framework, their specific location does not add any meaning or modification to themselves. However, the information which people place in the global network contributes the local knowledge to the global information network. In this regard, “space of information flows” and “space of places” do not replace each other.

To conclude, the importance of human actor as “produser”, placeless ubiquity, mass-to-mass communication, interaction between local knowledge and global information network call for the attention that substantial nature of globalization should be studied in the context of Web 2.0 environment.

 

Chetan  Chawla (@ChetanChawla), “Unweaving the Web: Prosumption as Strategy  – The Case of User Generated Content”

The goal of a firm is to create value; all strategies have this aspiration as an implicit assumption. However, the chief arbiters of value are customers (Priem, 2007) who have traditionally received inadequate attention in strategic management (Brief & Bazerman, 2003). Borrowing from the literature on services co-production (Skaggs & Huffman, 2003; Vargo, Maglio, & Akaka, 2008) and the “consumer benefits experienced” (CBE) perspective (Priem, 2007), this paper traces the importance of customers in the process of value creation and posits that all firms can use insights from services co-production to gain sustainable competitive advantage.

In order to explicate the growing importance of value co-production, this paper focuses on value co-production in the form of user-generated content in online services. The phenomena of consumers being part of the production process in the information age led Toffler, Longul, & Forbes (1981) to coin the term prosumer. Nonetheless, the extent of value co-production or prosumption has accelerated in recent years with the advent of the World Wide Web. Originally conceived as a combination of hypertext and computer networks to enable Berners-Lee to remember linkages between projects, labs and people at CERN (Berners-Lee & Fischetti, 1999); the web has evolved into a complex socio-technical system with reflexive generative properties that are always under the threat of Balkanization (Zittrain, 2009) and political intervention (Gonsalves, 2011).

In their seminal paper on evolving a new dominant logic in marketing, (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) argue that the extant paradigms in marketing have been derived from economics and have a focus on the exchange of “goods”. This manufacturing centric worldview is also the dominant logic prevalent in strategic management. This is contrary to the reality of the U.S. economy in which the non-manufacturing sector contributes as much as ninety percent of GDP (Chandra, 2011). One side effect of the dominant logic of manufacturing has been the exclusion of the demand dimension from our theories (Priem, 2007) such as transaction cost economics (Williamson, 1973), positioning (Porter, 1980) and the resource based view (Barney, 1991). Instead, the focus has been on carving the value pie with the intention of capturing the biggest slice for oneself, the underlying assumption being that value creation is a zero sum game.

This manufacturing centric logic with its focus on tangible resources, embedded values and transactions is in stark contrast to the services dominant logic that incorporates intangible resources, co-created value and relationships. This unbalanced approach is also reflected in the theoretical neglect of prosumption, especially in online businesses, in management research. This neglect is unfortunate as it impedes one of the key expectations from management researchers – real world relevance (Okhuysen & Bonardi, 2011). As pointed out by (Brief & Bazerman, 2003), the increasing demands on businesses to create net benefit for society is concomitant with a need for research to understand the mechanisms by which firms can accomplish this goal. This paper concurs with (Brief & Bazerman, 2003: 188) in their assessment that action needs to be moral and for such moral action to occur, people need to be treated as ends in themselves. This echoes one of stakeholder theories (Evan & Freeman, 1988) central tenets: a customer’s right to not be treated by a firm as merely the means to an end. Thus, an inclusion of a more services oriented logic in strategic management also allows firms to address issues of legitimacy, environmental responsibility, social benefit and ethical behavior that have been on the rise since the 1960s – 70s (Ansoff, 1977). This may be accomplished by looking at customers as prosumers, i.e., as important partners in value co-creation and not simply as end consumers of a firm’s output.

This paper contributes to our understanding of the changing face of capitalism in the face of increased consumer involvement in the production process (Shirky, 2010). The rise of social network sites (Boyd & Ellison, 2008) has further accelerated information flows outside the domain of firms. These long term socio-economic trends driven by new technologies (Beniger, 1986; Carr, 2008) suggest that new theoretical paradigms are needed to unweave the web and grasp the complexity we confront. It is clear that the dominance of the manufacturing paradigm within strategic management and allied disciplines has outlived its utility and needs to be supplanted by a more inclusive value co-creation approach more apposite for the global information society (Beniger, 1986) we inhabit. Successful companies are already adopting the new ethos of value co-creation (Ramaswamy, 2008); it is up to researchers to now incorporate this new reality of business with the goal of “bringing in consumers” (Brief & Bazerman, 2003).

Presider: Joe Waggle

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 9th. 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.

 

Ashlee Humphreys, “The Construction of Value in Attention Economies”

On Wednesday night, Zach, also known as YorkieVids , posted a simple video of his dog for friends to see.  On Thursday morning he woke up to find 620 emails in his inbox, all raving about his video and eagerly expecting more.  Within a few months, his video had garnered 1,602,053 views, 2,149 comments and was rated by 5,576 people, with an average rating of 4.48 out of 5 stars. Over the next year, Zach gained 3,647 subscribers who now follow his videos on a regular basis, offering encouraging comments and enthusiastic support. How did Zach’s video go from a throwaway to a phenomenon? What about it attracted the attention of over a million viewers and how did this change Zach’s idea of what he was doing?  What caused people to stay with him, following his next dog “masterpieces”? The goal of this article is to answer these questions using the framework of attention economy.

This paper investigates the process of value creation in an attention economy.  Previous research has enumerated the broad dynamics of an attention economy, but has not theorized the micro-interactional relationships that lead to value creation.  To understand how people view themselves within attention exchange systems, we interviewed users of YouTube, an internet community where people exchange videos, post comments, and maintain personal profiles.  Several sets of materials from the site were collected including interviews, user comments, profile contents, and the videos themselves.  Thirty-one interviews were conducted, 15 in situ over the internet via private messages (Giesler 2006; Kozinets 2002), 15 face-to-face, and one phone interview.  Interviews lasted about an hour and a half, on average, and solicited information about the informant’s interactions with other users on the site, and their opinions on the videos they watched or created, and the process of watching or creating these videos.

In general, we find that value is created through interactions between several user-created roles—fans and celebrities, viewers and producers. We document the evolution of these roles as the exchange network develops and as social and cultural capital is accumulated.  This process has several implications for conceptualizing online exchange. First, people construct their role in relation to other people in the exchange in systematic ways.  They will, for example, think of themselves as a ‘passive viewer’ in contrast to more active fans in the community or a viewer in contrast to a producer.  These identities change systematically both temporally within the exchange itself and between exchanges in the system.  A user may be a celebrity in one exchange, but then identify as a fan in the next exchange.  Yet this identification is only one part of the social role. That is, users form a sense of identity and then find it confirmed or disconfirmed in interactions with others in the role set (Cooley 1902; Mead 1934).

Previous theories of fans and celebrities have studied contexts in which the fan or celebrity has a relatively fixed identity as a fan or as a celebrity (Dyer 1979; Gamson 1994; Jenkins 1992).  In an increasingly democratized media-marketplace, however, these lines are blurred as common folk become celebrities via reality TV and celebrities become fans of their favorite designers or brands.  Similarly, in cases where the means of production (especially media production) are widely available, people increasingly negotiate identity shifts between producers and consumers.

Second, value is created through the accumulation of fan feedback via a four stage process.  Previous work on attention economies has extensively investigated the historical changes that have led to the commodification of attention, but have not examined the micro-interactional process that leads to value creation itself.  By examining celebrity production, fan response, and the institutional, archival mechanisms that enable reification of value, this article has laid out a model for the production of value in an attention economy.

Third, by studying this sharing system, we gain insight into the factors that motivate people to share (Belk 2009).  Previous books on the attention economy have stressed the convertibility of attention to money, but neglected the barter system of attention exchange that may be more prevalent, and more meaningful.  In an exchange system like YouTube, people regularly exchange attention. These exchanges build attention capital or what we might more colloquially call celebrity status. The exchange of comments, as currency repays sharers for their work and motivates them to produce again. Further, these comments form a more reified indicator of value when they are used as metrics for measuring celebrity/producer value. In this sense, they truly are the capital on which this non-monetary exchange system functions.

 

Han-Teng  Liao, “Keyword Economy of the Web: Seeking Order in Open Linguistic Materials”

Though the general trend of digital and computer network development is faster and bigger in content production and circulation, not all languages suffer from the problem of overabundance like English.  Thus, before one can theorize about information or attention in the Web environment, this essay proposes a theoretical framework that highlights the socio- and computational- linguistic dimension of the World-Wide Web: keyword economy.  By “economy” I mean the metric system that is first defined by the concept of “relevance” in the study of information retrieval and information science and then implemented by modern search engines to provide users with relevant search results in a very short time.  Thus, in such an economy, both the concept and experience of “relevance” is based on the heuristics of matching linguistic symbols and calculating hyperlinks connections, so that the vast amount of documents can be first indexed by a list of linguistic tokens and then differentiated based on the search keywords input by users.  The essay proposes that it is the order of relevance, albeit artificially constructed over the open linguistic materials, that become the scarce resource of keyword economy that shapes the perceived quality (and thus usually monetary and/or symbolic value) of information and provides the underlying incentives for Web content generation, especially to those who desire to define certain keywords.   The essay concludes with several cultural, political and economic implications with the proposed theory of the Web as a keyword economy, as opposed to the more popular concepts as information economy or attention economy.

The first implication is relevant to the debate of the Internet vs. the multiple Internets.  If the Web and other Internet applications are seen as parts of the keyword economy, then it is language-specific, albeit not always domain specific, simply because of the underlying socio- and computational- linguistic calculation metrics.   Thus when US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton claims that “there isn’t an economic internet and a social internet and a political internet; there’s just the internet”, it is partly true.  For example, the global oil company BP buys the keyword of “oil spill” and the anti-Semitic website Jew Watch dominates several search results on the keyword “Jew”. The economic, social and political can converge on a word or phrase.  However, there is probably an English-written internet and a Chinese-written internet and a Hindi-written internet because BP has to buy the Chinese keywords of “oil spill” and Jew Watch’s dominance of search results are limited to English-written search engines and search keywords.    Thus, using the concept of keyword economy, as opposed to information economy or attention economy, can highlight the role of the capacity of digital and computer networks to match and calculate symbolic materials for internet development.  Another important implication is the potential cultural, political and economic mobilization around certain keywords to form a voice for collective action, with also corresponding issues such as language planning, content censorship and content farms.   Since the role of language has been crucial in running a state, creating a market and fostering civic societies, it is necessary to re-examines the potential power of keyword economy for changing the status quo, or the existing institutions and their ways of managing linguistic materials.   Finally, by seeing the Web as a “keyword economy” where economy, in the classic political economic sense, means a set of calculus to govern and manage scarce resource, this essay argues that, between the raw linguistic materials and user input search terms, the calculus and data of “relevance” is constructed as scarce resource, where information can be ranked and attention be distributed.  Hence, the prerequisite for an information economy or an attention economy may be a keyword economy that constructs the concept and experience of “relevance” for both the content generation and search keywords for a certain language, which may or may not be bounded by national or geographic borders.

 

Piergiorgio Degli Esposti (@pgde), “Information overload and size paradox”

Information overload, spam, advertisement, dataflow, tweets and wikipedia are a part of our lives, whether or not it’s wanted. One of the main characteristics of the web today is the dematerialization of space as we know it; the amount of data flow is at a constant increase and cloud computing is giving everyone with internet access the opportunity to obtain this infinite archive of data. Within the data floating around on every platform, there is very little valuable information. Some theoretical approaches to understanding navigating the internet are keen to the notion of a paradigm switch, in which it is a shared opportunity offered by digital technologies and social web platforms that is more and more valued (Anderson, Lessig, Jenkins). Relating to the task at hand when using the internet to research information are many big-time companies such as the top search engines (Google, Yahoo) and social network sites (Facebook) that are earning profits by filtering the vast amount of data flow for the user, and setting them onto a pre-planned path, acting like digital “weinees” (Ritzer).

According to Kelly (2008), the internet acts like a global copy machine that constantly reproduces, organizes and relays information. Some of the information flow becomes transformed into platforms that can be controlled by the owner of the content. Other information simply just flows and rebounds off of each other every which way becoming noise for the system so that users are consequently not able to decode it; in other words, it becomes digital garbage. This cognitive surplus (Shirky) gives the possibility of there being unqualified users, blurring the differences between professionals and amateurs, but at the same time the centrality switch offered by web 2.0, from efficiency to effectiveness (Ritzer, Jurghenson) generates an overlap in the production process, and even if data weight can be considered visible, the overlap in the significance process is of great analytical relevance.

Society and markets have never before experienced an era with so much information entirely mediated by a self-upgrading artificial structure that learns from user history through searches and tendencies. The bulimia effect that it causes reflects what is happening in real world consumption. The phrase “bigger is better” models the limits in the material world and culture. The mega structures of the web platforms are becoming more and more like “dinosaurs of consumption” (Ritzer). Continued access to an infinite amount of irrelevant data is almost like an act of desperation as many mega web platforms head towards failure, giving the feeling that their hype is ending for a particular platform while keeping intact their position as a “digital dinosaur.” Boyd talks about Second Life, a digital cemetery, a platform in which all the informational value created by the user’s activity is vanishing away, thus overturning the platform into a huge data disposal.

Speed is a key factor in this process of burning value and information that has become typical of the digital age, but isn’t it true that the faster something grows, the faster it will disappear? Is informational value related more to it’s “just in time tweet,” i.e., the timing of the information, rather than for its content? Is the internet as it is today an empowering tool for humanity or is it just building a data pit which uses the system to discern valuable information from digital garbage? How can we deal with the paradox between empowerment and exploitation proposed by contemporary informational systems? Is digital bureaucracy, a global social class that owns cultural, economical and social capital, growing from the contemporary media environment? What is its collective ethos? These are the main questions that society will have to confront.

Presider: Jessica Vitak

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 9th to join in the conversation on this and many other topics related to the social impacts of technology.

 

Stephanie  Vineyard, “Technology and Social Capital: How new media tools give opportunities to women”

Knowledge is Power.  As illustrated by the recent Tunisian revolut, those who have access to knowledge control the power.  Access and acquisition of knowledge does not exist in a vacuum.  Knowledge is acquired and spread through our social networks.  Economists look to capital measurements of monetary value or production value or military capital to judge the power and success of a country.  What is only recently being studied but has existing since the beginning of cultural formation is social capital.  Humans are social beings and build our knowledge and power through the relationships we hold with others, thus our social capital.

Social capital is necessary to facilitate change and development within a society.  As Paul Collier in The Bottom Billion notes, successful development requires cultural change that alters the architecture of interactions within a society (Collier, 2007).  Dense clusters among homophilic groups are easy to identify and build, but bridges that cut across existing division between these dense clusters must be established.  These can exist on a variety of levels – gender, income, ethnicity, and age.  Building bridges establishes weak links between network clusters of dense ties, and thus increases the social capital for an individual, a dense network of individuals, and an entire culture.

Women are particularly isolated in countries with less economic opportunity and lack social capital.  Recently, development experts acknowledge the importance of bridging women together to build dense networks as well as connecting them to the existent power structure (Coleman, 2010).  Studies show women are the key to improving health and education, reducing violence and corruption, and building infrastructure in their communities.  In order to establish effective cultural change, women must practice development principles and spread information and knowledge through dense social networks (Watts, 2004).

Today, new technologies help overcome the barriers that isolate individuals and groups within a social structure.  For example, social media allows people to communicate across both literal and figurative borders.  Enabling people to establish these connections opens up opportunities beyond those of their immediate community.  In Tunisia, these technologies allowed individuals to disseminate information and connect with others in their community without the government control.  Given their marginalization in social structures, women stand to gain the most from these opportunities.  This raises the question: How can new social networking technologies help women build social capital and bridge the gaps to the power structures within their societies.

This paper will be a timely analysis of the role of technology in establishing social capital.  While I will use the example of social media in creating social capital for women suffering harassment in Cairo, Egypt via the HarassMap, I will also shed some light on the role social media played in the movement in Tunisia.  I will begin by examining social capital and the power with a social structure.  I will then explore the role of women in development based on their place in a social structure.  After applying these theories to the aforementioned case studies, I will conclude my research based on its ability to answer the question proposed and explore possible implications.

 

Nick Violi (@nvioli), “Motivation for Participation in Online Neighborhood Watch Communities”

This paper presents a three-part experiment designed to investigate the motivations of users of a community safety and neighborhood watch social networking website. The experiment centers around an intervention into the invitation system that current users employ to invite nonmembers to join the site. The intervention involves several versions of an invitation email which differ by expressing one of four possible motivations for using such a site. The research presented investigates how potential users’ choice of whether or not to join the site is affected by the use case presented by the invitation. Also included is an investigation of the motivations of current users of the site, as reported in an online survey. The experiment revealed that an invitation emphasizing altruistic aspects of the community outperformed the control, it yielded generally positive, though inconclusive results for an invitation emphasizing the egoistic aspects of the community, and it yielded contradictory results for invitations emphasizing collectivist and principlist aspects of the community.

With the increasing popularity of social networks, it is becoming increasingly important for the administrators of those networks to understand the motivations their users have for joining and staying active in the community. By understanding the motivations non-users have for joining such sites, administrators are able to create more effective and more persuasive appeals to potential users. By understanding the motivation longterm users have for continuing to participate, administrators are better able to retain current users. This paper concerns a small subset of online social networking sites, those created around community safety and neighborhood watch. The unique characteristics of such sites suggest that many users may share common motivations, and that those motivations may differ from those present in other social networking sites. In this paper the primary focus will be on the users’ initial motivations for joining such a site.

The presented experiment investigated the motivations of users in one community safety / neighborhood watch social networking site, Nation of Neighbors. By using a set of potential motivations derived from previous work in the area, the experimenters developed a set of emails which express different reasons for joining the community, and observed what effect the different motives have on the response rates. These effects were compared against data gathered by a colleague which includes the self-reported motivations of current and new users of the site.

 

Sara Martucci, “’The Most Important Day of Your Life:’ Friendship and support on an online wedding forum”

This project examines relationships of support on an Internet wedding-planning site. The website, LIWeddings.com (LIW), functions as a source of information for couples who are getting married in the New York Downstate area. The site links to various wedding vendors like DJs, florists and catering halls, but the more popular aspect is its message board. The women (there are hardly any regular posters who identify as male) are often planning large weddings that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Many of them come to the site looking for information about vendors and wedding locations, but find an online community of women much like themselves- young, middle class and usually white.

LIW gives these future brides the opportunity to discuss the joyful and stressful experiences they have during the wedding planning process. The women often mention that the other members are the only people they can turn to. The posts have a range of topics, and can focus on benign to very serious issues. Sometimes the women ask for advice about wedding registry items or suggestions on what to wear for their bridal shower. At other times they may log on to vent about money, their jobs or “FH” (Future Husband).

The women on the site are usually most active in their yearly cohort’s chat board. Throughout the day the regular posters (about 30-50 women per cohort) answer questions and offer advice to their fellow brides, often posting new threads themselves about the aforementioned topics or things that are NWR (not wedding related). Frequently there are posts about rather serious matters—trouble with significant others, parental health problems, and issues at work. Over the months they spend on the site these women get to know each other’s occupational and familial circumstances. When one of the posters is experiencing some difficulty in life, the others rally around her with words of encouragement and sympathy; however the nature of the support differs depending on whether the initial post was written by a regular or less involved member. Following Martha Nussbaum’s (2001) analysis of compassion  and Jack Barbalet’s (1998) discussion of sympathy , I evaluate the vital role of emotional support in the creation and strengthening of these online friendships.

I have performed content analyses and interviewed site members to understand the networks of support and camaraderie these women create in a virtual space. Analyzing the content of selected forums lends insight into the varieties of issues these women discuss and the means through which they provide and request support to/from their fellow brides. Interviews with regulars from the site complement this material with an explicit account of the significance LIW interactions have for individual women.

Social networking sites, like the forums on LIW, play an increasingly substantial role in the daily lives of Internet users . Sites like these provide new environments for interpersonal interactions, making them an important topic for social research. In the case of LIW, a website initially designed as a platform for advertising serves a second—and arguably more significant— function as an important source of emotional support for young coupled women.

 

Ishani Mukherjee, “My husband doesn’t know I’m blogging: In Search of Safe Spaces Online”

Narratives of silence have often been a part of the life-stories of women who are the victims of domestic violence. To make matters worse, the tendency to posit “culture” as the sole cause for their physical and psychological abuses not only trivializes their pain, suffering, and resistance, but also suppresses the ethnic, racial, classist, sexual and heteronormative forces that have tried to kept them silent. Although the crime is not solely gender-specific, given quite a few instances of abuse that men face from their partners and that women receive from other women, for the very purpose of my paper I will focus on domestic violence against South Asian women particularly within the context of immigration and transnationalism, where women find their identities doubly displaced: by the politics of race/ethnicity and the constructs of gender.

To combat this painful muting mechanism, many South Asian immigrants are now writing blogs to re-cite testimonies of their own experiences of abuse and those of others, as they fight the domestic, political, economic, legal, cultural and social forces that have tried to keep them voiceless for so long. First, by using the race/gender theory of intersectionality, which argues that acts of violence faced by women of color are frequently the products of intersecting patterns of racism, sexism, cultural myths and legal pitfalls (Crenshaw, 1994), I will study a few South Asian community blogs that discuss the issue of domestic violence (DV). This will likely make clear the role of blogs in creating ethno-cultural discourses around sensitive, human-rights issues within the South Asian (SA) diaspora in the US. Secondly, by framing narrative blog exchanges as desired identity performance and as a system of hypertextual narrative strategies that re-formulate relationships between the writer/creator and reader/user, I argue that blogs have the potential to be alternative “third” communities that give SA women/men the desired identity to openly voice their/others’ struggles as immigrants and as victims of DV.

In fact, the imperative question to be asked is how these women claim alternate safe spaces that help them to come to terms with their split identities of being transnational immigrants on one hand, while on the other being regarded as the so-called repositories of culture/tradition as women from a non-western society? Conversely, do the abused SA women/those affected seem to be more at ease when narrating their testimonies online than in real life, given the current debate that participation in online communities at best neutralizes, or at least, blurs the divide between public and private? Many scholars and feminists have argued that isolation due to immigration is an important factor in domestic abuse among SA families, majorly due to the invisibility immigrant women experience because of their ethnicity and gender status in the U.S. (Abraham, M., 2000). In addition, the proliferation of external forces of racism and internalized sexism and feelings of shame (the notion that DV in some communities is a private issue, not meant to be disclosed in public) disempower victimized women from narrating their dilemmas. (Goel, 2005; Das Gupta, M., 2006; Das Gupta, S., 2007). In summary, most of these studies indicate the need to create a public safe-space and ethno-culturally adapted community interventions that address the discursive intersectionality of racial, sexual, gendered, class-based, cultural, economic and legal causes/forms of abuse that these women endure. Knowing these factors is imperative for understanding the historical and social underpinnings of DV within the SA diaspora in the US, and blog narratives may be one of the few accessible communication channels that create/disseminate multivocal and intersectional narratives about human rights issues through the exchange of personal stories by bloggers. This can not only encourage public participation of DV victims/activists and increase awareness of the issue from within, but also provide advice and information about culturally specific victim services and batterers’ interventions. Moreover, this study has future promise in terms of problematizing the racial-gender dichotomy in the online context, and complicating the potential that blogs have to disrupt the public-private divide, by narrating discursive communities into being that can create agentic counter-publics around issues such as SA DV.

Presider: Zachary Richer

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.

 

Lisa Sanders, “Computer Mediated Communication and Emotional Effervescence”

The (post)modern person’s life is, of course, made up of a multitude of social connections. But, unlike in the past, these social connections are more numerous and are more widely dispersed over space, and yet can virtually take place at the speed of light. Additionally, these connections are increasingly facilitated by one computerized device or another: phone calls, text messages, emails, instant messaging, photo sharing, video chatting, etc, are all important and significant computer-mediated means of social interaction in the 21st century. With these adjustments to today’s hypermobile way of life, the question of whether or not bodily co-presence is necessary for meaningful human interaction seems to answer itself if one simply looks at the world-wide usage statistics for social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. But, the question of how meaningful this non-co-present interaction is remains.  In other words, do human beings, as a species, truly need face-to-face interaction in order to fully  and meaningfully communicate with one another?

Using the theories of sociologists Jonathan H Turner and Randall Collins as a starting point, I argue that the greater speed and variety of daily face-to-face interactions in which modern humans are involved leads to increased anxiety. This is because, as Turner suggests, human beings are a species that initially evolved to be primarily solitary and to favor mostly weak, fluid social ties. In order to deal with the physiological and emotional anxiety caused by today’s modern hyper-interactions, human beings have created a new “space” to interact, where computer mediated communication (CMC)  dulls  those certain biological instincts that can inhibit face-to-face communication in our species.

Turner proposes that it was an evolutionary need for increased social solidarity and cooperation in the wild that caused our relatively unsocial hominid ancestors’ brains to develop an emotional “add-on” that allowed for increased communication (and thus sociality) for the purposes of survival.  However, according to Turner, the influence of our more primal brain structure lingers, and we, as a species, aren’t actually as socially inclined as many sociologists insist. From this stance, I argue that different parts of the brain are attracted to different aspects of cyberspace — the section of Turner’s brain that longs for physical isolation from other apes loves the long distance aspect of CMC, while the part of Turner’s brain that is more attuned to social interaction for social solidarity’s sake enjoys the fast paced IR chains (Collins), which  can be richly symbolic and yield high levels of emotional effervescence.

Thus I am arguing that the Internet works as a tool for social solidarity not despite both Turner and Collins’ objections about its lack of bodily co-presence but because of it. Without being bogged down by the trappings of physical proximity, humans are able to use CMC to engage in highly accelerated interaction rituals which generate high levels of emotional effervescence amongst their participants.

 

Tamara Peyton (@pstamara), “From emotion to action: The ontological politics of the ‘like’ button”

With the inclusion of a “like” button feature on Facebook, and the subsequent adoption of the metaphor on other social media sites such as YouTube, the idea of liking someone or something has changed. What it means to like has moved away from the realm of the emotive internal life of individuals and into the realm of the discursive public sphere of societies. Instead of being tied to an internal sensation that reacts almost instinctively to an external stimulus, to “like” now becomes a conscious and rationalized action that provides an external tag of connection between an individual, a discursive element and a social stance. Whether the act of clicking “like” is done to a Facebook status update, a forum post on one’s favourite videogame company website or to a YouTube video, to like is now to act, rather than to feel.

Following Annemarie Mol’s (1999) idea of ontological politics at work in actor networks, this paper will argue that the formerly understood private  emotive capacity of liking has been reshaped into an actor. When the like button is included as an option on content, it becomes part of a networked assemblage (2002) of demonstrative capacity that can be read in multiple ways. Remobilized into a status indicator, that acts both as a demonstrator of one’s capacity to align preference towards content, or used to indicate solidarity with another’s social stance, to like is to make known one’s liking. To “like” becomes problematized as the beginning of a chain of actions and connections demonstrated digitally through the stimulation and circulation of discourse.

Similar to Derrida’s (1982) notion of différance, a kind of meaning register shift occurs via this digital discourse. As this paper will demonstrate, the logic of intelligibility is disrupted through the exteriorization of previously interior perceptions and ideas. That shift in register is equally a shift in temporal status. To be known as a “liker” requires a waiting period that occurs between the act of clicking the “like” button and the reading of others of that “liking” action. In that liminal period between clicking the like button and being perceived as a liker, the button exteriorizes the necessity of the anxiety of waiting to the liking user. “Will people be happy that I like this thing? How will my friends react?” are the kinds of things that happen internally in the liker while they wait for the reaction to their reaction.

The liminality is resolved when a liker’s social circle notices their like and is thereby coerced into reacting. Even if the second person makes the choice to not do anything (i.e. to not “like” the item too), that conscious choice is a kind of action. More frequently, however, a chain of liking occurs within one’s social circle, reinforcing the demonstrative and discursive action power of the like button.

This action discourse is then further reinforced as social-political action via the capitalist bent of most social media websites. Given that sites such as Facebook and YouTube are ostensibly free to use, the like feature figures heavily in these social media sites’ market capitalization. To these companies, the idea of liking shifts registers again towards the advertising and investment market. The quantity of those who have liked an item is used by these companies as an indicator of loyal and receptive fans for another company’s products. The act of liking is then removed from the personal user’s hands, packaged up in the overall discourse of liking around a person, product or service, and sold by the social media platforms to other companies and political entities.

As this paper will conclude, to “like” shifts again, moving from the casual social to the serious consumption orientation and proof of taste demonstration within a web of idea flows in Western neoliberal consumer culture (Ong, 2006). In this way, to like is no longer to feel. Whether consciously or not, the act of liking on the web is the act of demonstrating an ontological stance of a neoliberal acting self as a social consumer.

 

Andrea Baker (@andee), “Comparing Online Communities: Norms, Structures and Processes of Two Groups of Music Fans”

Using dimensions of community from traditional online definitions and newer conceptions of internet researchers (see, e.g., Fernback, 2007, Katz, Rice, et al., 2004, Orgad, 2005), this paper will articulate features of online communities using data from an ethnographic study of rock music fan groups.  It will contribute to theories of online communities by comparing two groups devoted to the same band, analyzing both their commonalities and differences, with focus on where they diverge.

With data from 101 semi-structured interviews, and observation of sites for three years, the author compares two groups of Rolling Stone fans in how they embody principles of community.   Other communities of Stones fans were observed more informally. These basic components of community include: (1) emotional bonding of members (see Rheingold, 1993), (2) traditions and a sense of history through ritual, (3) common goals and identity, and (4) formal and informal norms of interaction.

The two groups differ in size and physical location of their members. “You Got me Rocking” (YGMR)* is larger and has a more European focus, with over half its members residing in Europe, the UK or Scandinavia.  “Shattered” is smaller, with most of its fans from the US and Canada.  Size and the distance members live from each other make a difference in how many meetings people have offline.  Rarely a problem in North America, there is also the language issue among European residents when travelling between countries, although many speak English or French.

From participant/observation in the two communities and the interview data, the research finds variation in the degree of cohesiveness of the two communities related to not only the major components, but also to attributes found within the processes of interaction among members of the groups.  Connected to differences in the four core components, the research finds divergences in online actions and technology that make one of the groups more of a true community than the other.   These factors are (a) frequency of meetings offline and their group visibility, (b) temperaments of leaders and their styles of leadership, (c) type of topics posted in the discussion areas, and (d) software components on the site. The factors found in comparing the communities contribute to their basic elements, or the strength of traditions and rituals, emotional bonding, common goals and evolving norms of interaction.

After detailing how the differences in the factors manifest themselves in online and offline structures and processes, the paper concludes with further suggestions for conceptual dimensions to use in comparing online communities, and in contrasting these to social network sites (see boyd and Ellison, 2001). These will aid future researchers in determining whether online groups have strong or weak ties, and in assessing if they fit either the community or networking rubric, giving scholars a common vocabulary to compare case studies across categories.  The identified aspects of online community also contribute to the growing literature outlining similarities and differences between groups and relationships in cyberspace and in those offline.

*The names of the groups are pseudonyms, derived from song titles, as are the real names of sites under study.

 

Meghan Rosatelli, “Digital Emotions: An approachable approach”

Embodiment theories, culture, and digital futures are each critical gateways into our understanding of emotion in digital space, but so far they have only been addressed in a very limited cultural scope through an even more limited lens of cognitive science. An accessible, inclusive framework for understanding emotions in digital space does not exist, and this absence in the midst of such dramatic changes to our communicative tools is disconcerting. We are only going to continue emoting in digital space, and as our emotions lead to actions with consequences we should be aware of these changes in both the technology and ourselves. Many questions arise from this problem: What does it mean to emote in digital space? Could this new environment and our interaction with (or our becoming) change who we are? (A twenty-first century human with a new emotional life? A new communal paradigm scenario?) What is lost or gained when we emote in digital space? How can we talk about emotions in digital space in a way that makes sense to the millions of people who are engaging in digital communication? The answers to these questions are vital to understanding shifting norms and behaviors as technology becomes more ubiquitous. Furthermore, the changing popular culture provides a good barometer for the future of emotions in digital space. Matching our understanding of science with the popular culture gives a more realistic understanding of the world and our ability to change it (or be changed by it). Right now, we are living an old conception of self that is no longer relevant in the twenty-first century. The theories that we have to work with are incredibly opaque and the science is truly in its infancy.

The science of emotions and the construction of self continue to rage on, luckily for us, as new technologies widen the view into our bodies and minds. What embodiment theories of emotions share with many other emotion theories, such as appraisal theories and cognitive theories, is the understanding that what we call “self” is plastic. We are changeable; sometimes consciously and many time unconsciously we shape to fit our world. Children born in the past fifteen years are growing up in a digital world that is radically different from our own childhood, and this world is changing the way their brains are wired. Heavy media multitaskers are more sensitive to distracting stimuli, and they use procedural memory (habit memory) more so than declarative memory (typically used in critical thinking).  Our “status update” world is rewriting our brains to react to short bursts of information constantly, instead of sustained, in-depth communication. I believe emotions lie at the heart of this shift between extended communication and short bursts of information because truncated communication, whether textual or visual, requires heightened emotive power to convey a state of being and inspire a response or behavior. Digital emotions are the embodied feedback of these short communiqués. I will present my framework of digital emotions, which suggests that emotional experiences that are facilitated by digital space and/or digital technologies are unique because of the intimate feedback that occurs between digital environments and our bodies. This feedback alters emotional experiences based on interactions with media, the community of users, and/or the aesthetic experience. Working separately, in tandem, or all at once, the media, users and experience both expand and limit our emotional repertoire through the ubiquity of emotion generating media and the redundancy of the media. The impact of such a broad range of emotional experiences in new, hybrid environments point to a shift in our understanding of the twenty-first century human by complicating our traditional understanding of community, empathy, and identity via face-to-face interactions.

Presider: Katie King

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:

 

Nicholas Boston, “The Amorous Migrant: Race, Relationships and Resettlement through Cyberspace”

This paper documents the cosmopolitan attitudes and interracial desire of recent gay Polish immigrant men to the United Kingdom and how they utilize two online dating sites, Gaydar.co.uk and Gayromeo.com, to seek out amorous and/or sexual contact with racial Others.

The study is based on an ethnography, conducted primarily online, between November 2007 and November 2010. The participants, numbering in the 90s, are all gay-identified, Polish-born men who arrived in Britain as immigrants post May 1, 2004, the date on which Poland officially entered the European Union (initiating the largest scale internal European economic migration, from Poland to Britain, in recent European history).  At this point, almost seven years after Britain opened its labor market to Poland and seven other former Eastern bloc countries joining the Union, there has not been an inconsiderable amount of scholarly and journalistic attention shone on Polish migrants in the United Kingdom.  Their presence has dramatically transformed the social landscape.  Very little work on the topic, however, has considered the role of the Internet in migrants’ everyday lives. Furthermore, with transnational coupling (mail order brides, family reunification, green card marriages, in addition to a plethora of emotion-based partnership transactions) having been explored by researchers, it is surprising that no existing study has focused specifically on Internet dating or the negotiation of sexuality via computer-mediated communication within this population.

This paper addresses these gaps in knowledge.

All participants in the present study came to it by the fact that they were men who initiated contact with the researcher, me, online on one of two gay dating/”hook up” sites, Gayromeo.com and Gaydar.co.uk, over the last three years while I was resident in Britain. They all were seeking sexual encounters or romantic relationships with a black man for one reason or another, they at some point made clear. Some said they were curious and always wanted “to try”; some said they had a preference for black men and only dated within that racial category; some said they dated all types of men, including blacks; some said they were “obsessed” with black men, yet, being from Poland, never had an opportunity to be intimate with any; some even said that a primary reason for migrating to Britain was to gain access to black men or men of color, in general, for sex and relationships.

I found this quite curious, as at one point, there was such a preponderance of recent Polish immigrant men contacting me through these websites with one or another of the aforementioned stories to tell. I began, from this curiosity, to make a study of the phenomenon.

The research shows the ways in which one cohort of gay, Polish, recently-immigrant men relate to multicultural Britain in and through their migratory choices, sexual interests (what I term, “libidinal cosmopolitanism”) and online behavior. It explains how sexuality and migration relate to, or influence, one another and how the Internet both facilitates and complicates contact with racial and national Others.

The study also reveals crucial details about the relationship of online behavior to offline subjectivity and the ways in which the architectures of online dating sites determine not only users’ choices but in many important senses their imaginaries.

 

Anastasia Salter (@MsAnastasia), “#DearJohn, Don’t be a Dickwolf; or, A Rape in Twitterspace”

Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace” offered a first glimpse of an online community setting its rules of discourse in the face of rape in a text-based space. More recently, Twitter has been a site of several showdowns over defining communal standards for the discourse of rape both in and out of online spaces. Three separate but intertwined campaigns arose in response to three events: the #MooreandMe campaign called for an apology from Moore in dismissing the allegations of rape against Julian Assange as a “so-called crime;” the #DearJohn campaign was a concerted effort to lobby Congressional representatives involved in a bill that would redefine rape for the purposes of abortion funding in a way that severely limited the term’s application, and a rape survivor explained her intention to boycott the gaming event Penny Arcade Expo because of the sale of “Dickwolves” t-shirts linked to a series of Penny Arcade comics on rape and started a movement.

The organizer for both #DearJohn and #MooreandMe, Sady Doyle, explained that Twitter was the perfect medium for the campaigns because “it was really equalizing, it wasn’t hierarchical, it ensured that voices and perspectives could influence the conversation regardless of how well-connected or well-known they were, and it was a very visible, trackable way to register dissent” (http://whereisyourline.org/2011/02/badass-activist-friday-presents-sady-doyle-of-tiger-beatdown/). These attributes have strengthened Twitter as a space for activist movements large and small—with results ranging from Michael Moore’s statement on TV retracting his earlier words to the removal of the Dickwolves t-shirt from the Penny Arcade store. #MooreandMe asked for a change in rhetoric, for an admission from Michael Moore that his words had encouraged the silencing of women. This laid the foundation for #DearJohn and #Dickwolves, both calls for action happening near-simultaneously and involving the active participation of rape survivors and their allies.

The very qualities of the network Sady Doyle emphasized are what distinguish Twitter from social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter. In an essay on Facebook as a space lacking in political activism, “Can Social Network Sites Enable Political Action?”, danah boyd noted: “Just as politically engaged people know one another, alienated and uninterested people mainly know people like themselves. Bridging the structural holes that divide these groups is just as challenging online as offline, if not more so. Offline, you know if a door has been slammed in your face; online, it is impossible to determine the response that the invisible audience is having to your message” (boyd 115). The same problems are present in Twitter discourse, as most tweets go unremarked. Twitter can feel like an echo chamber, with retweeting—the resending of your tweet by another user with your username acknowledged—a common way to demonstrate agreement. Yet activism on Twitter has the potential to transcend the boundaries of immediate social networks of shared interests: the hashtag approach has the ability to immediately draw users into an ongoing conversation, and the short form of Twitter makes it easy for the quick contribution of a new voice.

The activists in every one of these endeavors have found themselves assailed with rhetoric worthy of Mr. Bungle. The attacks on Dickwolves protesters came from accounts with names like “TeamRape” and “Dickwolvington” created under a veil of anonymity. Like Mr. Bungle, Dickwolvington no longer exists: a Twitter search on his username turns up no results. This occurred after a tweet from Penny Arcade’s writer, Gabe, requesting him to stop. The dynamic of the Rape in Cyberspace is here re-enacted: the “toaded” account has gone silent, but the communal space (in this case, Penny Arcade Expo) will never regain its comfort. And even as these hashtags go silent, the small victories won, the larger conflict remains a current of disruption in the Twittersphere.

 

Jarah Moesch (@jarahmoesch), “Queer Profiles: embodying the (computer) code”

(computer) code for everyday digital technologies/objects  is (usually) written by a human, or a group of humans, who have preconceived notions about the world, through their own common senses, knowledges, and values that enable them to do their work according to best practices and web-standardizations.

This paper focuses on the programmer’s embodiment of the code and how the programmer brings notions of the world into the code itself, thereby creating an invisible layer of embedded normativity.  I argue that the embodied actions of developers (and their socio-historical entanglements), along with standards and best practices, normalize our everyday digital interactions, rendering certain embodiments invisible.

The programmer (and development team) are humans who are, amongst other things, aged, gendered, classed, raced, sexualized, nationalized, and educated in particular ways.  These specific humans create meaning for our current interactions with, in and through multiple intersecting histories and genealogies over the space and time of the Internet.

How does this impact everyday life? How does embedded normativity within the code render the content inaccessible? (or doesn’t it?) How are our physical bodies rendered in code?  What do we learn when we read the ‘code’ that represents us?

Untangling this matrix requires a close reading and queer interpretation of the code that underlies it.  Using queer theory, phenomenology and critical code studies, I uncover what it means to queerly read the developer’s embodiment of the code for popular social media objects, such as user profiles and website taxonomies.

 

Alecea Standlee, “Technologies of Relationships: Meaning Making in the Techno-Organic Social World of College Students”

Generation Y, Millennials, Digital Natives, the Net Gen. These are all names for the generation of young people born in the United States between roughly 1983 and 2001 (Howe and Strauss 2000).  The last 20 years have been a time of dramatic techno-social transformation. Among them are cohorts of young people who encountered the meteoric rise of the internet as a communication form and social space at key developmental life phases and subsequently have demonstrated social behavior that uses internet technologies in day to day communication practices and social expectations.  This study examines the way in which internet technology based communication practices are implicated in the negotiation of relationships of intimacy, relationship negotiation and constructions of public and private spheres, among college students. This work explores the ways in which technology is deeply integrated into the social world in the present moment. I focus on the integration and detachment of technology in the interpersonal microstructures of the society.

Beginning with questions of experience, understanding and value within the role of intimate personal relationships, this paper will discuss some of the key findings from an ongoing study of technology use in college age adults. The primary questions for this project explore what techno-social behaviors are expected by college students of their peers, within the insular social world of university life. What importance and meaning do participants attach to compliant or non-compliance with such behavior? How do individuals experience the self in relation to participation in techno-organic social processes and the internalization of norms of technological integration within processes of social interaction? The pervasiveness of the Internet in social organizations and interaction plays a key role in shaping the social self. For those young people that grew to adulthood in an era of technological information revolutions, the power of technology to shape their social world and their social self is immense. Exploring the meanings, ideals and technological structures that young people experience has the potential to help researchers understand the social development and contemporary culture of this population.

Based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 32 college students at a private university in the northeast, this research explores the ways in which the social world of college students has become increasingly techno-organic. My research suggests the integration of internet technologies into norms that guide social practices and behavior may impact participant understanding and expectations of intimate social relationships. In analyzing this data I have concluded that social expectations of presence and absence in the technological realm are transferred to the social realm creating a presence/absence binary in interpersonal relationships. Within this binary discourse I suggest that despite popular culture representations of regular internet users as being isolated from the social world, the popularity of mobile internet devices and social media platforms has resulted in a kind of hyper-connection between participants. The importance of this binary will be discussed, including how it serves as a tool to pressure participants into techno-organic multi-modal communication practices in order to maintain social relationships. Within this social environment in which being connected, and being available function not simply as part of social relationships but form their core. The importance of accessibility for intimacy and collective social experience has resulted in the development of new social meanings attached to concepts of intimacy, specifically the redefinition of such a concept with increasingly common practices of public performance and narration of intimate life experiences.

 

Presider: David Strohecker

Bearing in mind the obvious disparities created by the digital divide, how does Web 2.0 offer spaces for resistance for minority populations and historically silenced groups? Although the primary beneficiaries of new internet technologies has historically been white males, recent developments in handheld technologies have admitted several minority populations to the world wide web for the first time (the homeless, working class groups, low income African Americans, non-Western users, etc.). In addition, Web 2.0 offers opportunities for minority perspectives to be heard in ways that traditional top-down media outlets do not. For instance, the blogosphere is awash with feminist blogs and progressive voices normally silenced by mainstream media. Similarly, the internet has provided avenues for people separated by geographical distance to coalesce and converse online. I have in mind here diasporic communities that now span the globe and can access one another via the world wide web. Finally, new group formations around shared interests (such as MMO gaming) yield opportunities for counter-ideologies to gain momentum and successfully challenge prevailing ideologies on particular websites and internet landscapes.

In this panel– fully titled,“Counter-Discourses: Resistance and Empowerment on Social Media” – we will be discussing these themes and more. Sabrina Weiss’ “Cyber-liberation: From Egypt to Azeroth” discusses the world of MMO gaming and its role in disrupting gender expectations. Rather than focus on men who use female avatars, Weiss focuses on a less visible group, women who use male avatars in their online gaming. She discusses how the internet overcomes the limitations of face-to-face communication by permitting individuals to safeguard potentially incriminating information about themselves. In this case, women can choose not to reveal their gender and thereby avoid sexist backlash from other male players. But is such subterfuge a form of resistance?
Similarly, Andrew Lynn’s piece “Authenticity FAIL: The Internet as Resistance to Popular Culture” discusses the ability of users to challenge and subvert the ideologies and messages of popular culture, thereby creating counter-discourses. More specifically, Lynn reflects on how users deconstruct and critique messages of mainstream media, revealing hypocrisies, contradictions, and implicit trends in consumer advertising and other media texts, most often through the use of humor. In this way, Lynn shows us how the backstage behavior of users on Web 2.0 becomes visible and made public through user-generated content. But does such behavior successfully challenge the hegemony of the mass media in the material world?

In a similar vein, Randy Lynn and Jeff Johnson’s “‘Bitches Love’ Ambiguous Sexism: Gender, ‘Karma,’ and the Limits of Male Progressivism in Online Communities” looks closely at Reddit.com, a user-driven website where content is ranked and rated by up and down arrows to yield a “karma” score. This “karma” score reflects the collective value attached to the given website, link, video, content, etc. Lynn and Johnson pay particular attention to constructions of gender ideology on Reddit, revealing the dichotomous trends towards misogyny and feminism that prevail online. Although the users of Reddit are primarily male, they are also largely progressive. This leads to a polarization of views on gender, where the most extreme views get high karma scores. But do these trends simply mirror larger political trends in the offline world? What does the political polarization online tell us about the offline world?

Finally, Jes Koepfler and Derek Hansen’s “Connecting: A Case Study of a Twitter Network for the Homeless” draws attention to an oft-misunderstood group of internet users: the homeless. Though this group is often overlooked in discussions of new media technologies, the homeless are becoming an integral part of Web 2.0. Koepfler and Hansen seek to understand how this group uses Twitter to express themselves and make their views heard. In short, Koepfler and Hansen seek to make this traditionally “invisible” group “visible” by outlining how the homeless use Twitter. But does Twitter actually give the homeless a voice or does it simply reify the “silencing” of the homeless in the material world? With celebrities gaining the most visibility on Twitter (http://twitaholic.com/), what does this mean for the homeless who make have much narrower social networks?

 

Sabrina Weiss, “Cyber-liberation: From Egypt to Azeroth”

The medium of the Internet is both self-powered and self-empowering for those who use it to create personas that control the amount and type of metadata released to other users in online social environments. Since all interactions on the Internet are filtered based on the preference of the user, the sharing of metadata can be controlled closely, unlike in the offline world.  This makes it possible for members of marginalized groups to transcend face-to-face social limitations imposed on them and participate more fully and actively in social communities built around cyber-identities and cooperative/competitive activities.

In studies of MMO avatar gender-bending, most research has focused on why males play female avatars because they comprise a highly visible group, both culturally and statistically.  By contrast, the number of female players who play male avatars is apparently very small, resulting in dismissal as academically uninteresting.  As a member of this extreme minority who has definite reasons for exclusively playing male avatars, I want to share my personal experiences and observations to offer a new perspective on this rare phenomenon that may not in fact be so rare.  When offline gender expectations are kept out of game, a female player is allowed to develop camaraderie and respect based on ability and skill untainted by gender norms and stereotypes.  Through this discussion, the larger theme of identity control through the medium of the Internet is explored.

Cyber-liberation comes not just from withholding offline identity metadata, and it can concern larger issues than recreational gaming, like offline liberation.   In some cases, such as in the Tahrir Square protests, it was empowering for women to be seen actively calling for protests both online and in the streets.  The YouTube videos posted by activists like Aasma Mahfouz are powerful partly because one can see that they are women making powerful statements from a position presumably of disempowerment.  From this, it can be surmised that a group that is more disempowered in offline interactions by metadata will potentially gain more from access to online social technologies because they will have the choice whether or not to release that information as appropriate to the situation.

 

Andrew Lynn, “Authenticity FAIL: The Internet as Resistance to Popular Culture”

Past research has focused on the internet and blogosphere as a medium where vernacular voices can challenge institutional authority and the hegemonic discourses that dominate more traditional media sources. While the effectiveness of digital activism has been debated within both academic and popular circles, less attention has been given to the internet’s ability to challenge hegemonic images and narratives within advertising, politics, and popular culture. Theories of culture and ideology often overlook the “cultural autonomy” of online space, which possesses unique abilities to facilitate a dialogical contestation of popular culture and its legitimacy.

One particular means of contestation has become prevalent throughout the blogosphere: evaluating, challenging, or unmasking cultural items for their perceived inauthentic representation of reality. In this presentation I look at several internet-based cultural objects—online videos, blogs, images, remixes, parodies—that fit within an “authenticity FAIL” genre of online culture. These items draw on the temporal and spatial freedom of the internet to provide new contexts to images, narratives, and values propagated by traditional media. This recontextualization highlights the formulaic and thereby challenges authenticity. Examples would be synching up of the 2008 Presidential Debates or stitching together infomercials to highlight unoriginality. Other examples involve spotting patterns in advertising images that suggest particular marketing tropes.

The ability of this phenomenon to impact discourse warrants new appreciation for the internet as a “site of contestation” for those seeking cultural or societal influence. There are many continuities with earlier anti-consumerism “culture jammers,” particularly the thought of Guy Debord and his conception of modifying advertising to subvert its meaning (détournement). At the same time, these tactics have been modified and popularized to new levels within online space: a diverse group of vernacular, activist, and even institutional voices have latched onto them as means of persuasion. In drawing on Sloterdijk’s conception of “resistant kynicism,” I examine how these items might embody a larger resistance effort of preserving authenticity and meaning within an increasingly consumer-driven and mediated cultural universe. While avoiding overly utopian interpretations, I argue the rise of participatory online space mirrors past media revolutions and thus requires greater reflection on the continuities and changes in culture, power structures, and public discourse.

 

Randy Lynn (and Jeff Johnson), “‘Bitches Love’ Ambiguous Sexism: Gender, ‘Karma,’ and the Limits of Male Progressivism in Online Communities”

The Internet has long been studied as a space in which hegemonic masculinities have been reinforced and challenged. On one hand, the semi-public nature of the Internet enables confrontations and rebuttals to sexist and masculinist ideologies; on the other hand, the same semi-public nature allows sexist and masculinist ideologies to proliferate. Moreover, stereotypes of gendered work ensure that Internet communities frequented by technologically literate populations are construed as masculine spaces, in which masculinist perspectives may be implicitly or explicitly sanctioned while feminist perspectives are ignored, belittled, or suppressed.

This study investigates gender relations among users of Reddit, a social news website with 13 million unique monthly visitors. Reddit users conceive of themselves as a population in which men are a majority, although a significant minority of users claim to be women. They also conceive of themselves as being younger, more politically progressive, and less socially adept than the population at large. Users create posts or submit hyperlinks to Internet content, which other users may evaluate positively by casting an “upvote” and negatively by casting a “downvote.” The net score is collectively referred to as “karma.” “Link karma” determines the visibility of links within the subforum to which it was submitted, while the links with the highest karma are displayed on the front page of the site. Reddit users may comment upon posts or links, and these user comments are also quantified by means of upvotes and downvotes. “Comment karma” determines the visibility of comments within an online discussion surrounding a post or link.

The characteristics of Reddit and its user population render the site uniquely amenable to a mixed method approach combining discourse analysis and quantitative methods. Although most users claim to be men, a significant minority claims to be women. Moreover, the progressive political inclination of Reddit’s user population yields a significant subset of male users who resist masculinist discourses. However, many male Reddit users propound and support masculinist discourses, including those that are hostile to women. Discussions of gender relations are common at Reddit, and often both masculinist and feminist discourses will be represented and receive high comment karma. A sample of comments drawn from front-page links or posts will be situated in the particular discursive and cultural contexts of Reddit, linking comments to broader cultural practices such as the use of humor.

In addition, the karma model provides a direct measure of the support (or lack thereof) for comments espousing particular norms and attitudes toward gender. This study draws from the literature of ambivalent sexism to construct categories of sexist and anti-sexist discourse and uses regression methods to identify the most popular discourses, while controlling for other factors that may influence the karma of a comment (such as a user’s overall karma or when the comment was submitted). This analysis will engage with previous findings regarding the “silencing” of oppressed populations, the dissonance between progressive political ideologies and the support of patriarchal perspectives, and the broader literature of gender relations in online communities. Implications and limitations will be discussed.

 

 

Jan Koepfler ([(@jeskak] and Derek Hansen) , “Connecting: A Case Study of a Twitter Network for the Homeless”
I became interested in how marginalized groups were using social media during HCIL Service Day last year (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/designingforabetterworld/). When I told friends and colleagues that I would be working with a homeless shelter to help redesign an area of their website that was for their clients, I often received funny looks and remarks like, “But why would homeless people need a website?” When I got to the shelter on Service Day and listened as the group debated how to change the information architecture of the site, I couldn’t help but think how much easier the decision-making process would have been if we had our key stakeholders-the homeless clients of ThriveDC-in the room with us.

This experience raised questions about online participation and social media use by the homeless. Were they in the same social spaces as everyone else (e.g. Twitter)? With the potential benefits of anonymity on the web, would we even find anyone identifying as homeless? A primary goal of this first pilot study was to simply dispel some myths around homelessness and technology, and to build a case for future research in this area.

Homelessness affects those who may be sheltered or unsheltered, as well as “doubled-up” – those who move from the couch of one friend, family member, or acquaintance to another, and may never access homeless services. Understanding the breadth of the issue and the environmental contexts for homelessness is important because it quickly changes one’s perceptions of what it means to be homeless and the potential points of access one may have to online networks. Research shows that although the homeless lack certain material resources, many have access to information and communication technologies through public libraries, computer labs in day shelters, and mobile technologies (Eyrich-Garg, 2010, 2011; Roberson & Nardi, 2010).

Identifying and counting the homeless is challenging enough given the broad range of reasons for becoming homeless and the myriad places homeless people stay (e.g. in shelters, in cars, under bridges, on couches, in motels, etc.). Finding homeless people online posed a similar challenge, so we started with a known network on Twitter called @wearevisible. The goal of the We Are Visible project (www.wearevisible.com) is to empower homeless people to use social media and the web to bring a human voice to the issue of homelessness. Although the network was only 4 months old at the time of the study, we were able to address two key questions:

  1. To what extent are homeless individuals using the @wearevisible network?
  2. In what ways are homeless individuals connected to each other and other types of users in the @wearevisible network?
A range of user types emerged based on a content analysis of Twitter biographies (n=483)

Example bios from Homeless individuals:

“@bedbugsbite22: Former yuppie, now homeless. Shit happens – at least sometimes it’s funny.”

“@alifumich: Living in my camper w/ my husband, dog and 3 cats. Jobless, homeless, but can still smile!”

This subsample of the network shows homeless individuals (outer ring) connected to each other with some connections to homeless advocates (middle ring) and service organizations (inner ring), suggesting opportunities for future uses of social media for information and resource diffusion.

The results have inspired a series of follow-up research questions related to online vs. offline information diffusion and resource access, and highlight opportunities to think about the design of online communities to support marginalized individuals.

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of truth-seekers entreats Deep Thought, an artificially-intelligent supercomputer, to reveal the answer to the most elusive question in existence, “What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?”

Deep Thought takes up the challenge, but warns that it will require no less than seven and a half million years to produce the answer. Given the scope of the challenge, Deep Thought’s petitioners accept the computer’s terms and leave it to their descendants to benefit from Deep Thought’s protracted ruminations. Finally, following eons of cogitation, Deep Thought stirs and announces, ominously, that the long-awaited answer is ready–but Deep Thought adds that the answer is unlikely to be a crowd-pleaser. Their patience at an end, Deep Thought’s supplicants insist that the computer unveil the monumental secret that they have waited so long and faithfully to hear. At that, Deep Thought heaves an electronic sigh and pronounces that the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is…

…forty-two.

As Deep Thought predicted, the assemblage reacts unfavorably to such a meaningless answer. Deep Thought fires back that the answer is perfect, rather the fault lies with the question: the answer, forty-two, is unintelligible only because Deep Thought’s patrons never really understood their original question.

Aha!

So, what does this have to do with artificial intelligence research? A lot, actually.

At this point, I should emphasize that I am a huge supporter of information technology and AI. The smarter that our technologies become, the more likely it is that we’ll be able to solve the many problems (e.g., war, famine, disease, natural disaster, pollution, energy shortages, etc.) that humanity faces.

That said, the conundrum that Deep Thought reveals (i.e., it is difficult to find the right answers if we don’t really understand our questions) is reminiscent of the challenges that AI researchers confront with regard to the definition of intelligence. AI researchers have a crystal clear vision of their ultimate goal: creating intelligent machines–just like that smart-aleck Deep Thought. The problem is: AI researchers have at best a weak understanding the question, “What is intelligence?” For example, at present, one of the most widespread misperceptions about intelligence is that–get this!–intelligence can be represented as a number. Whereas Deep Thought contends that the answer to life, the universe and everything is forty-two, many intelligence experts are convinced that intelligence can be characterized as a single number; a.k.a., an IQ score. If I didn’t know better, I’d be convinced that this was just another one of Douglas Adams’ jokes.

It makes about as much sense to say that intelligence is equivalent to a score of 81, 97, 112, or 250 as it does to claim that the meaning of life, the universe and everything is 42. The difference between these assertions is that Douglas Adams was joking, whereas psychometricians are serious.

But, here’s the best part. In the Hitchhiker’s Guide, Deep Thought hatches a bold plan to solve the problem of “how to understand the question”; it’s another joke, but it contains a marvelous kernel of truth. Deep Thought creates the most sophisticated computer in the universe (i.e., the earth) and runs a multi-billion year program (i.e., the evolution of life on earth) through which to create organisms (i.e., humans) who develop the necessary mental faculties to understand the meaning of existence. Thus, the moral of the story is that the answer lies within. It simply takes the necessary wisdom to understand the question.

Poetry.

The only snag is that, at the very moment that humans finally achieve enlightenment, a bunch of Vogons blast the earth into cosmic dust. There’s a lesson in that, too. Humans have always relied on their brains for survival. So, now and forever, humanity has got to continue getting smarter or we’ll end up being obliterated by our problems.

The point of all this is that, if we try hard enough, humans will surely be able to figure out the meaning of life, the universe and everything–and also the key to artificial intelligence. The trick is to seek the real, hidden knowledge that lies behind otherwise meaningless numbers.

Timothy McGettigan is a professor of sociology at Colorado State University – Pueblo.

 

This post originally appeared on one of our favorite blogs, OWNI, 18 February, 2011.

“Internet Freedom? There’s no app for that!” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on Tuesday concerning Internet freedom resembled an online activism campaign from Steve Jobs. A year after laying the foundation for the “21st Century Statecraft” (the catch phrase invented by spin doctors to define diplomacy connections), Clinton was once again promoting Internet freedom, though this time she chose her words more carefully.

At the beginning of 2010, her speech coincided with the incident between Google and China. This time, Clinton waited patiently for positive results from the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions before launching into her diatribe. With a storytelling air, she started her speech by referring to the temporary Internet black-out initiated by Moubarak:

A few minutes after midnight on January 28, the Internet went dark across Egypt.

She did not waste much time before mentioning Neda, the young Iranian women who was murdered during the demonstrations against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election. Her acts of martyrdom fueled the “green revolution” along with protesters against Ahmadinejad’s regime. After Clinton praised the liberating nature of the Internet in the recent uprisings, the face of U.S. diplomacy insisted on putting the events in context of the Arab world:

What happened in Egypt and Iran – where this week again violence was used against protesters – was about a great deal more than the Internet. In each case, people protested because of a deep frustration with the political and economic conditions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted, and the authorities tracked and blocked and detained them. The Internet did not do any of those things. People did.

Without questioning Facebook’s role in the riots inspired by Sidi Bouzid or the importance of a “downgraded channel” in an isolated Egypt, Clinton’s statement seems obvious – but it is not trivial. Moments after Moubarak’s resignation, Google and Facebook adopted similar policies, taking care not to over-emphasize their role in these historic movements. Mark Zuckerberg’s company used very precaution language in an attempt to spare Facebook’s business model in neighboring countries. Formerly promoting the “soft power” of the Internet, Clinton changed gears to focus on “the people.”

Hillary Clinton’s discourse in 2010…

… and in 2011

The 3 axes…and WikiLeaks

In a seemingly two-faced manner (The freedoms to assemble and associate also apply in cyberspace), Hillary Clinton raised three challenges facing the U.S. administration, the “ground-rules to protect against wrong-doing and harm.” In attempting to show balance on every point, she lists three the major lines of reasoning, although the first two interpretations are relatively disturbing:

Liberty and security. “Without security, liberty is fragile. Without liberty, security is oppressive,” she nobly declared. She then immediately acknowledged the “threats” of the above mentioned: pornography, human trafficking, terrorism, and cybercrime, which she insinuated was lumped in with hacking (“Governments use the Internet to steal intellectual property and sabotage critical infrastructure”… and so does WikiLeaks).

Transparency and confidentiality. From the outset, Clinton denounced WikiLeaks and the “false” debate surrounding the scandal.”Fundamentally, the Wikileaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a brief case.” In using the same political discourse that marked the post 9/11 era, the Secretary of State indirectly dismissed Julian Assange’s work (and the underlying ideals) as a threat to national security.

Freedom of speech and fostering tolerance and civility. Recalling the American Muslim leaders’ recent visit to Auschwitz and Dachau, she heavily insisted on the necessity to have multiple means for expression. She used the occasion to reveal that $25 million dollars in additional funding will be allotted in fighting for Internet freedom in authoritarian regimes. Yet it appears that these project have their limitations, as shown from the previous Haystack [FR] catastrophe.

“Do what I say, not what I do”

More than ever, the vague policies resulting from these challenges show the extent of the American government’s schizophrenic character, whose message on digital technology is increasingly following a “do what I say, not what I do” attitude. Clinton reminded her audience that the US States Department has not strongly criticized WikiLeaks because “it is part of the Internet.” She spoke diplomatically when she alluded to a truth that is often ignored: if WikiLeaks had decided to leak the secrets of dictators, the State Department would have embraced such actions. The organization may have even tasted the millions of dollars that the US is pouring into Internet freedom projects. For proof, just listen to Clinton singing the praises of a “Vietnamese lawyer who denounced corruption” along with others advocates.

But there is more to this story. While the Secretary of State was delivering her speech, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) convened to discuss the “new digital age.” Known as an “independent” agency, it is responsible for coordinating public services from Washington to the international scale. Similar to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, the BBG is an establishment which promoted democracy in the Soviet bloc during the cold war.

The final report of the BBG made its findings very clear: the events that shook the Arab world “demonstrates the power of social media.” Another host on the Farsi version of Radio Free Europe took the argument further:

Without Facebook, nothing is possible these days.

Under direct orders from the State Department, are these diplomatic tools trying to be autonomous and disconnected from official discourse? While Obama’s technical advisers are tripping over trying to find a consensus, Hillary is proposing an equilibrium between the carrot and stick approach. Yet the digital consciousness in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, and Bahrain could soon change parameters of the situation.

Surveillance in the name of realpolitik

While the State Department deems Internet openness as the Holy Grail of a new network civilization, 100% of American businesses profit from a new market that results from transparency. To avoid losing ground to foreign competition, both large and small corporations comply with local standards to preserve domestic stability. Narus, a small business in California, sold “real-time traffic intelligence equipment” to Egyptian authorities. The computer enterprise Cisco, worth $7.7 billion in sales, was implicated (through a leaked PowerPoint presentation) in assisting Chinese officials’ objectives in censorship. Even Google is still filtering their content across Beijing’s Great Firewall in the name of realpolitik.

Entangled in its own contradictions, the criticisms of the Marshall cyber-plan by certain activist may be short lived. A few months ago, a Tunisian blogger called Sami Ben Gharbia lashed out as the State Department’s policy, highlighting the inconsistencies in the administration:

If the U.S. and other Western governments want to support Internet Freedom they should start by prohibiting the export of censor wares and other filtering software to our countries. After all, most of the tools used to muzzle our online free expression and monitor our activities on the Internet are being engineered and sold by American and Western corporations. The other problem is that the U.S. and other Western governments are not challenged from the inside about their policy. Our U.S. free speech advocates and dear friends should put more pressure on their own government to halt the export of this kind of tools to our regimes instead of lobbying for more money to help build yet another hyped circumvention tool or support dissidents topple their regime.

 

Maryland Morning host Sheilah Kast interviewed Cyborgology editors Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey about social media’s role in the recent protests in the Middle East.  Here’s a brief synopsis:

Citizens of countries throughout the Middle East were risking their lives to air grievances against their rulers long before Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg even enrolled at Harvard nine years ago. This year, though, they’ve taken to the streets in unprecedented numbers, and they’re using social media to organize themselves.

The phrase “Twitter Revolution” is now being thrown around in the media. Is that overstating it? Or is social media fundamentally changing the dynamic between governments and their citizens?

Listen to the full interview: http://mdmorn.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/218112-social-media-in-the-middle-east/