I have been invited to give a paper at the 4th Inclusiva-net Meeting: P2P Networks and Processes, organized by Medialab-Prado (in Madrid). The meeting will focus on “an analysis of ‘peer-to-peer’ networks and network processes, highlighting the social potentials of cooperative systems and processes based on the structures and dynamics inherent to these types of networks.”

I’ve heard good things about this workshop, and it looks like an interesting selection of papers. My own contribution is titled Peerless: The Ethics of P2P Network Disassembly. The proposal is below.

In theory, P2P networks embody a model of collaboration that spells out the end of monopolies of communication. Like the Inclusiva-net Call for Papers states, P2P exemplifies principles like “equality of power among participants, free cooperation among them, putting into circulation or forming what are considered ‘common goods’, and participation and communication ‘from many to many.’” While all this has been empirically confirmed in isolated cases, we need to question the ‘goodness’ of these premises at a large societal scale.

Even if we are to accept the claim that P2P network architecture engenders publics instead of markets, we should not put aside Kierkergaard’s critique of publics as nihilistic systems intended to facilitate the accumulation of information while postponing action indefinitely. While Kierkergaard was putting down newspaper media, his critique couldn’t be more fitting in the age of Web browsers, RSS aggregators and bitTorrent clients. Another way of putting this is to say that while P2P networks may indeed democratize access to cultural contents, we still need to ask: Whose cultural contents? The whole piracy debate revolves around the fact that the statistical majority of ‘pirates’ are using P2P networks not to disseminate radical countercultural products, but to share the latest Hollywood blockbuster or teen idol musical hit. We need to question how network processes normalize monocultures, and to do so we need to theorize what form of resistance is embodied by existing in the peripheries of networks.

In my work, I argue that digital technosocial networks (DTSNs) function not just as metaphors to describe sociality, but as full templates or models for organizing it. Since in order for something to be relevant or even visible within the network it needs to be rendered as a node, DTSNs are constituted as totalities by what they include as much as by what they exclude. I propose a framework for understanding the epistemological exclusion embedded in the structure and dynamics of DTSNs, and for exploring the ethical questions associated with the nature of the bond between the node and the excluded other. Contrary to its depiction in diagrams, the outside of the network is not empty but inhabited by multitudes that do not conform to the organizing logic of the network. Thus, I put forth a theory for how the peripheries of the network represent an ethical resistance to the network, and I suggest that these peripheries, the only sites from which it is possible to un-think the network episteme, can inform emerging models of identity and sociality.

This is important because we are perhaps entering an age when deviation from social norms will only be possible in the private, non-surveilled space of the paranodal (the space beyond the nodes), away from the templates of the network as model for organizing sociality. Subjectivization, as Rancière argues, happens precisely through a process of disidentification: parts of society disidentify themselves from the whole, and individuals and groups recognize themselves as separate from the mainstream. Thus, to paraphrase Rancière, the paranodal is the part of those who have no part; it is the place where we experience—or at least are free to theorize—what it is like to be outside the network. Articulating this form of disidentification, of imagining and claiming difference even in relation to ‘democratic’ P2P networks, is an important step in the actualization of alternative ways of knowing and acting in the world.

Andrea Batista Schlesinger: You write that “We should be less concerned about designing technologies that will afford young people ’satisfying participation opportunities’ and more concerned about ensuring that new generations can challenge and question the opportunities that are ‘offered’ to them. The goal –for young people as well as old– should be the self-critical individual.” Do you think that the Internet — either as a medium, or as an environment — inspires/encourages such self-critique? Do you think that digital natives are more or less likely to be interested in and have the capacity for inquiry and/or self-reflection?

Ulises Mejias: Well, as with any discussion about the affordances of a technology (what the technology allows us to do or prevents us from doing), there are two sides to that answer. First: Structure is not everything! The features of the Internet by themselves do not promote or encourage x or y, democracy or tyranny. From that perspective, we can view claims that the internet will help us do this or that as simplistic. Ultimately, it’s all about what people do on the internet, how they choose to apply this technology (this is the cultural materialist or social constructivist position). In other words, the same Internet structures can be used in ways that promote self-realization, or for exactly the opposite purpose.

Which brings us to the other (seemingly contradictory) side of the answer: Structure is something! The technological features of the Internet do shape the nature of our actions to some extent. Consider, for instance, claims like Nicholas Carr’s that the Internet is making us stupid by diminishing our powers of concentration, distracting us with advertisements, and promoting a broad but superficial kind of knowledge that erases the possibility of a shared cultural meaning. According to these kinds of arguments, the way the Internet is used is not necessarily contributing to our capacity for inquiry and self-reflection.

I think what is important to recognize here is that when a particular use of a technology becomes the norm for a large percentage of the population, there is no way we can avoid saying that technology shapes society (or what is known as technological determinism). So despite the fact that the Internet is being used by a few people to engage in critical inquiry, at a mass level the Internet is not being utilized that way — that’s the norm.

Why do I say this? Well, the word ‘mass’ is very important here. A self-critical mass is an oxymoron. I do believe that the values behind today’s Internet mass applications (especially anything controlled by commercial interests, i.e. most of the Internet) are not meant to help people become critical, much less self-critical. They are meant to turn them into better consumers. Sure, I think the Internet offers exiting new possibilities for inquiry, activism, social involvement, etc., but it’s naive to think that these will become widespread without a fundamental change in social, political and economic structures. And to think that the same Internet that promotes the creation of masses will help us achieve such change is a double fallacy. I’m not saying it won’t play a role. It must. But the Internet by itself will not liberate us, that’s for sure.

ABS: Does the Internet create habits of mind that are conducive to the asking of questions? Studies indicate that young people engage with the news more as headline skimmers, and that they don’t spend much time evaluating the results that they get back from Google searches. But perhaps this is just about the young people we’re raising, and not about the Internet. Or is it inherent to the abundance of information that the Internet offers? Relatedly, do you think that the Internet encourages an “answer” orientation — that it’s all out there, you just have to find it?

UM: Geert Lovink recently wrote an article in which he calls on us to stop searching and start questioning. I couldn’t agree more. We’ve come to believe that Google has all the answers, without realizing that what is changing is our ability to formulate questions Google can’t answer. As suggested by the Carr article mentioned above, I do think that the Internet is changing our research habits and our relationship to knowledge, for the worse. What’s interesting is that when I discussed the Carr article with my students, they said: “The Internet is not making us stupid, it’s just making us lazy.” That’s even worse! We can’t help it if we are stupid. But to be lazy suggests that we know there is an alternative, perhaps even a better alternative, but we consciously choose to go with the option that requires the least effort and that places less demands on questioning what we are doing. This is typical mass behavior.

ABS: You wrote about online protest and its lack of efficacy – both in terms of its impact on government and the experience of those involved. You tie this to the lessening relevance of the “local.” How do you see the rise of the “Facebook cause” related to the interest in involvement in local community activism? Are they in competition? Do you think that inquiry is more, less, or equally present in involvement in the actual physical local community versus online causes? You wrote about the lack of risk in online protesting. Is this lack of risk accompanied by, or the cause of, a lack of questioning when it comes to deciding how or if to be involved in this cause?

UM: I believe that the Internet can help small groups with the organizational aspects of activism, but on the other hand I think that the Internet’s mass commercial applications, including the so-called Web 2.0 services, militate against civic engagement. The only thing what you call the “Facebook cause” (that web application intended to rally people around a social issue) can contribute is mass numbers: massive membership, massive signatures attached to the petition, massive numbers of comments and opinions… all of which can be easily dismissed because there is only a ‘virtual’ weight behind them. Reminds me of a quote by Gilles Deleuze: “Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves… What we’re are plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements” (1995, Negotiations, Columbia University Press, p. 129). Of course, Walter Benjamin had already touched upon this “adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality” back in 1936 when he wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” So online activism is quite vocal, but not much else. Which is not to say that a “Facebook cause” cannot provoke some people to take action to the next level, to something that unfolds beyond the domain of cyberspace. Whether the sum of these little ‘lines of flight’ are enough to counter mass behavior remains to be seen.

You bring up an interesting point: Is online activism bankrupt because it cannot concern itself with the local? Actually, no. Unlike other critics, I do not proclaim the devaluation of the near and the death of distance at the hands of virtual reality. Networks do not create exclusive links to the far; they link to the near as well. What we should be looking at is the emergence of networked nearness — the phenomenon of rendering nearness in such a way that if something is not on the network it might as well not exist (even if this ’something’ exists in un-networked proximity). So the ‘local’ is alive and well. The problem is that we increasingly depend on technological networks to reveal what is local, what is near. And when the networks are controlled exclusively by commercial interests, this might be a problem. The social, as someone said, becomes part of the economy, instead of the economy being a part of the social. The process of inquiry that can lead to the kind of (risky) commitment to a social cause that can be translated into more than just an expression of support is subverted by the lazy behavior of the masses.

(Photo and interview: Ulises Mejias, Creative Commons 2008)

For the last interview in this series, I sat down to talk to Rob van Kranenburg. Rob works at Waag Society, a new media think-tank that “wants to be on the forefront of developments by creating a consensus among as many of the stakeholders as possible (companies, government, citizens, European laws and professionals) to anchor values [such] as solidarity, sharing, learning to learn, creativity, beauty and a sense of change and innovation as deep as possible within the code and infrastructure.” Rob is head of the Public Domain program. A large part of his work deals with the problematic shift (evident in technologies such as RFID) from “privacy compliant applications to privacy compliant technology.” We met at the Waag offices in Nieuwmarkt, Amsterdam, on June 17.

THE OUTSOURCING OF MEMORY AND AGENCY

Ulises Mejias: Since a lot of your work has to do with Ambient Intelligence, why don’t you start by telling us what that is? You have a phrase here, in one of the essays you gave me, about “outsourcing memory and agency to an ever more seemingly controllable environment on an individual level that is perceived as convenient.”

Rob van Kranenburg: Let’s start with the example of a pencil. As you write things down, you are outsourcing your memory into the environment. That’s how the Western notion of technology has worked. But now the idea is to hide all these functionalities into our environment. Like electricity, basically. It’s been hidden. All we see is the On/Off switch. Nobody knows how it works. If there is a power break, everything breaks. The same goes for our computer. The idea behind Ambient Intelligence, Pervasive Computing or whatever you want to call it, is to take the intelligence out of the computer box. I should make my environment ‘intelligent:’ I should make my clothes intelligent, my chair intelligent, so they recognize me. The walls in my house should sense whether I’m depressed. So this promise that the world can recognize you every step of the way, and give you everything you need, is very powerful. But the thing is that this notion of Ambient Intelligence can only work on a very stable environment. If the environment changes, it has very big consequences, on an interface level. Change must be minimal. It’s a totalitarian logic, within the whole system. Because it assumes it needs to be stable in order to “live.” We will have new generations growing up dumber in their interfacing activities with these environments, because there’s no need for them to think otherwise; they are being taken care of.

UM: What sort of projects are you working on at Waag?

RvK: There’s basically three tracks. One of them is called Smart Environments, and it’s kind of a full-fledged procedure or protocol to handle the Ambient Intelligence debate. We are trying to host the debate, to bring all these positions around the table, with the very naive and romantic view that we can actually get some kind of open source foundation for the infrastructure. It’s sort of the ultimate Dutch model, which is: We realize it’s inevitable, we are not going to try to stop it, we just want to make it… less bad! This is one track, and it flows immediately into another one called Smart Citizens.

UM: What’s that about?

RvK: This reflects my fear (I always see the dystopias; that’s what I do!) that despite the Internet, despite mobile phones, GPS, etc. …despite all these connectivities… people still have no repository of actions for making sense of what is behind the technology. All the kings before me did not have the tools I have now. All the philosophers before could not do what I do now. So people think they have all this connectivity, but they have no clue about the infrastructure that’s feeding the technology. And this infrastructure is saying: “Outsource all your interfacing to me! I’ll take care of it.” The result is that people cannot fix their own cars. No one cares about it, because everyone assumes the economy will just keep functioning the way it does. But even at a practical level, with 130 euros for a barrel of oil, and going up, it’s going to be very difficult to uphold this Ambient Intelligence dream. So we have this kind of citizens, who feel themselves kings, but have no clue about infrastructures anymore, and who’ve given up lots of solidarity moments also, because the Nation State is an empty shell… So what we need to do is script new solidarities with these new technologies, and not all this fear, and all this control. This is a major challenge.

UM: How does the Waag Society address this challenge?

RvK: The role of a place like the Waag is to put these things on the agenda, and be able to talk to the ministries as well as the hackers. For instance, last week we hosted the Commission on Privacy and Ethics, a very high-level commission with the Chief of Police, and the Chief of the Council of Culture, and we were able to put together a very mixed group of young people, privacy activists, etc. This is one of the few places where you can do this, because we have the respect of all the different parties, and can bring them to the table. So at the beginning of the Waag the idea was to have public domain on the Internet. But the Internet is going to be the Internet of Things, so we are going to have to look out for the public domain in this Internet of Things, which is everyday life! That’s why Smart Exchange is the third trajectory, looking for what is common, not so much what is different. We are all confronting the same issues. Ambient Intelligence is everywhere. RFID is everywhere. China just ordered one billion Smart Cards. Chinese university students are monitored in highly surveilled campuses. It looks very friendly, and very nice, but throughout these wireless interventions, people are being steered in certain directions. Smart Architecture is around the corner: materials that can change color or shape if you have the right Bluetooth ring or something … it really gets to a Harry Potter level, where some people will be able to see a door and some won’t. So we need to focus on these common denominators. If there is a kind of perverse capitalism working in there, why can’t we work in there? They work through the protocols, so why can’t we have the protocols working for us? Or make our own!

COUNTER (AMBIENT) INTELLIGENCE

UM: You argue that top-down policy making doesn’t work: “regulation is always a system failure as consensus should have been scripted into the design.” Can solidarity really be scripted into the code, as you suggest?

RvK: Maybe I don’t really believe it, but I think it’s our only chance now. It’s pointless to go to the RFID manufacturers and tell them “I’m against you.” But if I say: “Look, I think there is more money in privacy as a unique selling point,” then they will listen. Then you can start showing them things like RFID Guardian.

UM: You are somewhat pessimistic. In you writing you say: “Currently there is no alternative, no competition for the dream of pervasive computing, ubicomp, ambient intelligence, calm technology, disappearing computer.” But then I also sense some optimism, some hope being placed in the Open Source model. Is Open Source enough to counter the totalitarian tendencies of Ambient Intelligence?

RvK: I think it’s not enough. What is needed is first of all a place to articulate this opposition from. Even that seems to be gone. The universities, they just go with the flow. Companies offer intriguing research projects to the schools, who accept them without question. The teachers just keep an eye on the process and project management. The students implement whatever needs to be implemented. Then there are very few philosophers and political thinkers offering a critique, because one is immediately accused of being naive, of a sort of hippie optimism. Open Source as such needs to be investigated for all everyday activities. So we can talk about open source energies, and generic infrastructures, infrastructures that are of the people, out of the hands of the market, which is what we are trying to do at Bricolabs ["A distributed network for global and local development of generic infrastructures incrementally developed by communities"]. But right now Open Source is very much drenched in this ubicomp, pervasive computing model. IBM is really big into it. As long as it means “I’m opening up the sources, but I hold the key to the infrastructure,” it doesn’t really work. Corporations benefit because people are contributing their free time to building all these beautiful things for them.

UM: What happens to the concept of the public in Ambient Intelligence?

RvK: There really is no more public. The audience is really fragmented, their attention diverted from scandal to scandal. So we deal with experts, we talk to experts in the government, in companies, etc. But then what? When you try to reach out to people, they’ve got kids, and jobs, and no time. Everything that’s perceived as helpful is seen as good. For instance, Albert Heijn [a supermarket chain in The Netherlands] is going to begin experimenting with fingerprint scanning technology as a way to save time at the checkout lane, and that’s seen as good. In response to increased surveillance, people keep saying “I’m not doing anything wrong! I’ve got nothing to hide.” It’s very difficult to convince them that it’s not about what is considered wrong now, but what will be deemed wrong in three, four, or five years, when the infrastructure is in place, and all your movements can be tracked and traced and logged. But people don’t want to think about the ‘cool’ technology right now, they just want to use it! So the only way to make it a little better is to embed all these issues in the infrastructure. And that’s what we are trying to do with Smart Environments. Will this halt the machine? I don’t think so. But we can at least try to ease the transition. What else can we do? The Unibomber option is not an option for us, I don’t think. Adding more terror to already existing terror. One can also drop out, retreat. There’s people finding out which zones are not covered by mobile phone networks, and then buying that land. But maybe there is also a revolution somewhere in there waiting to happen. Something like the total fluke that was TCP/IP.

(Anne Beaulieu (left) and Sally Wyatt. Photo and interview: Ulises Mejias, Creative Commons 2008)

Anne Beaulieu (bio, publications) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Virtual Knowledge Studio (VKS). Sally Wyatt (bio, publications) is Professor of Digital Cultures in Development at Maastricht University and also a Senior Research Fellows at VKS. The Virtual Knowledge Studio “supports researchers in the humanities and social sciences in the Netherlands in the creation of new scholarly practices and in their reflection on e-research in relation to their fields.” My interview with them took place on June 6 at the VKS Amsterdam offices, housed in the International Institute of Social History.

Ulises Mejias: Why don’t we start by you telling me what the VKS does?

Anne Beaulieu: The Virtual Knowledge Studio has a dual mission of studying new research practices and also supporting researchers who want to ‘play around’ with new research practices. We are called upon to play three different roles: The first is as broker, as someone who can translate between the different groups who are active in this new area of e-research–between humanities scholars and people who are actually building tools, for instance; and the requests for us to play that role can come from both kinds of actors. Another role we have is to document what these practices are, whether it means new kinds of collaboration, or new kinds of communication, or new ways of producing data or sources. That work is of interest to people in technology studies, but also to people in the field, where we are studying the practices. The third role is really to think and try out new practices, and sometimes these are things we do in-house, in our ‘collaboratories,’ but it can also be very concrete contributions in ongoing outside projects.

Sally Wyatt: One of the main ways of collaborating with researchers is through what we call campus sites. We now have one at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the other at Maastricht University, which I’m responsible for and which we just started a few months ago. So that’s a way to extend our reach.

THE METAPHOR OF VIRTUALITY

UM: Let’s go back to the name of the organization: Virtual Knowledge Studio. Sally, in your paper Danger! Metaphors at Work in Economics, Geophysiology, and the Internet (PDF) you write:

“The future of science and technology is actively created in the present through contested claims and counterclaims over its potential. Language is an important tool, alongside social practices and material objects, in attempts to construct the future. Metaphors not only help us to think about the future; they are a resource deployed by a variety of actors to shape the future.”

What about this metaphor of ‘virtual knowledge’? Has knowledge been indeed virtualized by ICTs?

AB: This is actually a question that has been asked in relation to the Virtual Ethnography collaboratory, in exactly those terms. In some ways ‘virtual knowledge’ is a label that is meant to invoke something different. You probably heard Paul (Wouters) elaborate on the three aspects of our name in the video commemorating the launch of VKS. Certainly we are well aware that we have some accountability or responsibility to the hype that goes with a term like ‘virtual.’ The term carries some kind of promise, or some kind of evocation of change or difference and improvement. And part of the vote of confidence we had in setting up the studio was fueled by those kinds of aspirations. On the other hand we want to stay critical of the hype, so we embrace it but not in a naive way. And I don’t think we could’ve picked a name that didn’t carry any kind of connotation…

UM: To me, ‘virtual’–at least in the way in which it is sometimes used in critical theory–suggests disembodiment. But it seems like the kind of work that you do is very much about trying to localize and situate knowledge, as a social construct.

SW: I think what I like about the term ‘virtual knowledge’ is that it does capture the notion of ‘knowledge between people,’ the shared nature of knowledge, the different ways of doing that, getting into the –as you say– practices and situatedness of knowledge, which I think is an important dimension of our work.

THE SOCIAL AS OBJECT OF STUDY

UM: Another common metaphor these days is that of the ’social’ (social software, social media). But maybe the metaphor has become a bit overused? In a recent blog post, someone stated: “Let’s Get Rid of the Word ‘Social’ in ‘Social Network’… we do NETWORK SCIENCE ….. not SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS.” Which to me sounds like a questioning of the value of the social sciences as a way to study these new technologies of mediation. What are the limits, in your opinion, of a research methodology based on the social sciences?

SW: I think there are two questions there…

UM: There might be a lot of questions packed in there! [laughter]

SW: One is about social sciences as an approach, and the other one about ’social’ as an object. Personally–and my guess is that within the VKS there might be differences about this–I still think ’social’ does some important work, in both of the senses implied by your question. My worry about dropping the word ’social’ from ’social network analysis’ is that it would give primacy and priority to the material components of networks.

AB: Social networks as a field of study was around long before we started thinking about computer networks. And then with the Web–with email and social networking sites–it’s as though the hardware or electronic network starts to overdetermine the object of social networks… you can point to it, and you can measure it… it’s as though it becomes data-driven. And I guess I feel that by removing the ’social,’ it’s kind of one step further in that direction…

UM: Let’s switch gears a little bit. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this search engine, Rushmoredrive.com. Basically, it advertises itself as a search engine for the Black community. They have an algorithm that supposedly yields results based on the preferences, likes, dislikes, of someone who is Black (and they say Black as opposed to African American because they are international in their focus). So the next step is a search engine for every minority. Will there still be margins in the information society when everyone has their own custom-designed search algorithm?

AB:…The mind boggles as to how one can derive Blackness from a search engine operation!

UM: I don’t know much about the mechanics of it, but I’m assuming that certain results are weighted more than others. So the assumption is that they have a formula for weighting some elements of the search results more than others.

SW: But weight them according to what? Sounds like a fascinating thing to study.

AB: It’s embedding racial distinction into the level of the technology… But these fears of fragmentation were already being voiced in terms of being able to customize interfaces, and I don’t think that has really happened. The fear was that we would loose this sense of public experience, of public discourse, by having this possibility of customizing information.

SW: Right. We had all these discussion in the late 90’s about portals, gated bits of the internet, much more highly mediated and structured experiences. But they really never took off, did they?

AB: I think the narrative is that search engines became so efficient as to bypass any kind of editing or structuring. And I don’t mean to sound like I’m saying: ‘Search engines are neutral, let’s not racialize them!’ Maybe this is interesting because in some ways it interrogates the whiteness of mainstream search engines.

SW: Which is of course just as mysterious in terms of how they work.

NEW MEDIA AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES

UM: In another piece co-authored by various people at VKS (Messy Shapes of Knowledge: STS Explores Informatization, New Media, and Academic Work, PDF), you talk about a certain form of method-oriented technological determinism, the idea that new media requires new research methods. Don’t we in fact need new methods to study the social impact of new technologies?

SW: Do new objects always require new methods of study? Yes and No is the easy answer.

AB: ‘No’ because otherwise you deny that any kind of practice or tradition informs that particular technology. And ‘Yes’ because you might otherwise not be sensitive to some innovative elements that might be present.

SW: I think it goes back to something we said right at the beginning about the dangers of hype and novelty. I think that applies to methods as well as objects. But to take a slightly different approach to the question, it also about whether or not the technologies themselves enable different methods. I remember once reading something where the researcher was saying that online interviews (conducted via email) were not that different from face-to-face interviews. And I thought: Well, that’s a kind of a healthy skepticism. Then a bit later this person said that they went back to the respondent 23 times. I thought: You don’t do that in face-to-face interviewing. It is completely different! And then I think you need to reflect on that difference. Because you have a very different kind of relationship to your respondents, than if you interview them once, maybe twice… very occasionally three times. But certainly not 23 times! There is a kind of going back and forth that email facilitates… It might have started out as analogous to face-to-face interviewing, but then fairly quickly became something different that was facilitated by the medium.

AB: On the other hand, this difference can become the grounds to launch vitriolic attacks towards the medium, like when people say: You can’t possibly do an interview on email!

UM: Thanks for participating in this interview, and I promise I won’t come back to you 23 times!

Who owns your social network profile? — An Interview with Marc Worrell

(photo and interview: Ulises Mejias, Creative Commons 2008)

Marc Worrell (social network profile, personal website) is software architect and partner at Mediamatic, a hybrid enterprise/cultural organization in Amsterdam engaged in developing software applications for clients as well as exploring new media, art, and society through exhibitions, presentations, workshops, manifestations and all sort of onsite/online cultural events. Marc is the architect behind Mediamatic’s content management system (CMS) anyMeta, which you can see at work on their website. I interviewed Marc in the high-traffic kitchen area of Mediamatic on May 30th.

Ulises Mejias: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the history of Mediamatic?

Marc Worrell: The Mediamatic Foundation was started in the mid 1980’s by Willem Velthoven and Jans Possel. I think they were still students in Groningen, in northern Netherlands. And they started a magazine about new media. At the time, new media meant interactive CDs and such, so they started incorporating that into their work. As Willem himself says, because he started writing about new media, people assumed that he knew a lot about producing it, which is not necessarily the same! So the Foundation grew a more commercial branch next to it, Mediamatic IP. This company did web sites, print design, more commercial stuff. It also made it possible to fund the Foundation a little bit, at least with office space, etc. There was another branch that focused on education: people learning how to make websites, editing, how to write for the web, project management around Internet projects, etc. The philosophy at Mediamatic was always that once you learn how to do something, you immediately make it possible for other people to learn how to do it, redistributing the knowledge. Then of course we had the dot com crash. Money just ran out for Mediamatic IP. It was decided to continue with some projects, like the Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands, but Medimatic IP itself declared bankruptcy. At that time Mediamatic Lab was started, as a partner to the Foundation, and that’s where we do our work today on social networks, websites, etc. for our clients, and where we do the implementation of the “strange” ideas that come out of the Foundation.

ONE PROFILE, MANY NETWORKS

UM: One of your current projects is the “federation” of social networks. You are proposing a range of existing technologies to accomplish this. Can you talk about what this entails?

MW: This is in response to a problem we encountered. We are building online social networks for our customers. A lot of our customers are in the same field, the culture “industry” (to the extent that it can be called an industry). And so a lot of their visitors, the people who are interested in them, are in fact the same people. They have a big overlap in their communities. By the time you visit 10, 20 or 30 of these online communities and create a profile to join these networks, you are very tired of entering the same data into yet another community! So we thought about modifying this situation so that instead of building one big community for everyone, each institution could retain its own face, its own identity and place on the Internet, while still being able to hook them up together. And that is the Open CI project. It’s an old concept, but now there’s funding for it (from the community, from ourselves, from customers).

The basic idea is that people should be the owners of their own data. It’s a very popular thing to say these days, but how true is it? When you go to another social network site, you should be able to move your data there, and you should own it, and you should be able to remove it if you want to. Having a presence in a particular network does not necessarily mean using it as your homebase. When we look at the social networks we launch, they are very little — couple of thousand members perhaps. In some networks the overlap of members consists of a dozen or so persons. In other networks, the overlap is close to 80% of members. So what we want to do, using existing technology, is to allow a user to choose their homebase, somewhere, where they feel most at home. And we don’t care if this is in an institute’s social network, or our network, or their personal web site, or their chess club — whatever the place where they feel most at home. They could have more than one homebase, of course: one for work, another one for their personal life, etc. And from there you start using that identity. When you go to another website, you say: I am Marc from Mediamatic. I am not Marc from PICNIC. I stay Marc from Mediamatic when I go to PICNIC. That is how I choose to represent myself.

This technology is not new. It’s called Open ID. The first step in the sharing of profiles, sharing of identity, is Open ID. Then we have other technologies to allow you to start moving a kind of summary. Because technology dictates that you should have some local information at each network, otherwise it doesn’t perform well, it moves too slow. You want to be able to expedite searches, etc., so you have to have a kind of representation on that site. But this is just a kind of bookmark, of reference to your real identity. So you can truly join in in the fun at each network –write articles, make friends, etc.– but your homebase is wherever you choose.

OBSTACLES TO FEDERATING SOCIAL NETWORKS

UM: When you say that individuals should own their own data, I’m thinking about some of the obstacles that currently prevent that from happening, specially when it comes to commercial social networks. As I am sure you know, there are social network sites (such as Facebook, for instance) which basically have policies that say that whatever you put in the network belongs to them. So your data is not really your data.

MW: “All your data are belong to us.”

UM: Is that going to be an issue in the attempt to federate social network data?

MW: It might be an issue for them! We here at Mediamatic, and I personally, believe that there’s a more viable long-term future in very small-scale networks. There is always a place where you feel most at home. And I don’t really see a difference between the place you feel at home in real life and in virtual life.

UM: So you think when the federation of profiles becomes possible people will basically abandon the large-scale commercial social networks, with all their restrictions, to find a homebase in their own small-scale social networks, where they have the freedom to own their data?

MW: I don’t think they will abandon those networks, because they have many social connections there, but I do expect that there will be a slow migration to places where the management of their homebase is more personal and private, a place that’s more their own, instead of this big thing. Because in the end, like you say, these commercial social networks are huge and impersonal, there’s a big corporation behind it. Do we want these corporations to own our data? I don’t. It’s my data, I put a lot of effort into creating it. So I should be able to control it. Why would I want to create something and publish it in a place that I don’t know how long it will be around? Right now Facebook is big. But where were they five years ago, and where will they be 5 years from now?

UM: I’m still interested in the reasons why federating social networks might be resisted by the corporations that own (or will own, if patterns of media conglomeration continue) the largest social networks. In your articles you refer to these commercial networks as ‘walled gardens,’ and you argue that those walls should be brought down. But the thing is that from the point of view of the corporation, walled gardens make a lot of sense! Corporations have a couple of reasons for sticking to the walled garden model and blocking federation. First, these sites depend on growing memberships (more eyes exposed to advertising); they try to get users to their networks and abandon the competition’s. So social network federation might be seen as a deterrent for users to abandon one network (think Friendster) and move to the latest one. Second, social network federation might do to advertising in social network sites what RSS did to advertising in blogs: provide a way to focus on the content and strip away the advertising. Will commercial social network sites have a problem with all this?

MW: As far as the current business model goes, yes they will have a problem. But I think it’s also something you can’t stop. I think in the end there will be more success in supporting lots of different networks that are very focused. These sites also bring in a lot of advertising value. Advertising for a chess set in a chess club site is of more value than advertising in Facebook. This doesn’t mean that the entity hosting everything, supporting the whole infrastucture, needs to be divided into different companies. It can be one company. But the place where people meet, where people gather, however, is better off being small. Of course, right now you can have groups in Facebook. But the chess club doesn’t want to be a group in Facebook, it wants to be its own thing, with its clunky interface –people want to build it themselves. For the people who don’t want to do it themselves, who want to get it off the shelf, the commercial sites will continue to cater to them.

UM: For the first group of people, who want to do it themselves, how come we haven’t seen an open source social network platform?

MW: We will see it, no doubt about that. It’s been a bit hard, because the standards are not there, the pieces don’t work nicely together. But it’s just a matter of time. Just look at what has happened with open source blogging software.

BRIDGING CULTURAL DIVIDES IN THE NETHERLANDS THROUGH ART AND NEW MEDIA

UM: In reviewing some of the Mediamatic projects, I found a couple that seek to explore the (real or imagined) cultural divide between Muslim and Dutch cultures. Mediamatic is attempting to bridge that divide through art and design. What role do you think an organization like Mediamatic can play, or what role do you think new media can play in bridging these gaps?

MW: Well, I can talk more from a personal perspective, because most of those efforts are being lead by Willem and Jans. I think one of the most important things you can do is to talk about it. ‘Act normal, do normal,’ as the very Dutch saying goes. The most harmful thing you can do for your own society is, in my personal opinion, to start denying the fact that there are people other than you, and not talking to them… denying that they are there. At some point you will have to confront the fact that they are there, and at that point you can’t talk anymore, you’ve missed some important opportunities. I think what Mediamatic has done in some recent projects, like El HEMA*, etc., is to start bridging that gap, start talking about it, start representing the dialogue as normal. Start celebrating difference in culture, and start making it clear that Dutch culture and Western culture are the result of interaction with and embracing of other cultures. We can’t deny that we owe a lot to the Islamic and Arabic cultures (accounting system, technologies, etc.). Let’s not deny how much of our own values are coming from there, and the other way around. By bringing those two cultures into contact with each other, as Mediamatic has been trying to do, we seek to start that dialogue, start to show people that there’s nothing strange here…

* Note for non-Dutch readers: HEMA is a popular Dutch department store chain. El HEMA is a collaborative art project that “curiously and freely approaches the possibility of an Arabic HEMA,” complete with a line of products, a jingle, store designs, etc.

Making Sense of Information: An Interview with Rik Maes

(photo and interview: Ulises Mejias, Creative Commons 2008)

Rik Maes (bio, personal website) is currently Dean of the Executive Master in Information Management Program and Program Director of PrimaVera at the University of Amsterdam Business School (full disclosure: my research fellowship is sponsored by this program). We sat down to talk on May 28.

Ulises Mejias: What is PrimaVera?

Rik Maes: PrimaVera is the Program for Research in Information Management. It is part of the Department of Information Management, which is located in the UvA Business School. We started the program about 10 years ago, as a way to bring together a number of perspectives on the way we deal with information management. From the very beginning, a basic point was the issue of structuration, of the architecture of information systems. But another very important issue was the area of ‘making sense,’ of transforming information into something more: knowledge, wisdom… Over the years, our focus has evolved. One of the main subjects we are now dealing with is what we call ‘information governance’: producing and making good use of information in your organization. It is a positive concept, not so much a technical or operational concept.

INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS

UM: You believe that IT (Information Technologies) are intrinsically social technologies, and that they can be scientifically studied only from an interdisciplinary perspective. How is PrimaVera structured to facilitate this interdisciplinarity?

RM: PrimaVera as a program is more like a network of people. We have people visiting us, participating in one way or another in our programs. We have academics like Lucas Introna (Lancaster University) and Chun Wei Choo (University of Toronto, Canada), but we also have people from the industry sector who spend, let’s say, one day a week here doing applied research. So the program is more than just the people sitting here.

But to go back to the first point of your question: Yes, IT is intrinsically social, specially the new types of information technology. Previous technologies were characterized by a mechanical way of handling information, which is what we do with ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, for instance. Those technologies are based on the machine metaphor, where people are grouped around the machine, the ERP system, and if you don’t fit in that’s the end of the story; you have to adjust or you have to leave. Newer technologies are not based on that ideology.

UM: Do these new technologies need to be studied in an interdisciplinary way?

RM: Interdisciplinarity is important if we want our work to be relevant to the external world. Quite often we encounter the idea that interdisciplinarity has to do with a particular research methodology. I believe it also has to do with the relevance of our research to the outside world. The problems we face with Information Technology are only very partly technical problems, but are much more communication problems, which means we have to pay more attention to the human factors than we used to do in the past, like in information systems studies where we put a lot of effort on methodologies, etc. but that didn’t contribute very much to having a real effect in the world.

UM: You have said that information is interpretation and hence imagination, and that only by combining science and art can we evoke this imagination in its full richness. Aren’t science and art opposites? How can they be incorporated in information management?

RM: Basically, I believe that good information management consists of the right balance between, on the one side, informing organizations (bringing form to organizations, which means we need architectural concepts, or concepts of structuring), and inspiring organizations, bringing spirit back into the organization, the network. Unfortunately, in practice, information architecture gets so far away from that inspiration; it’s just identity confirming, structuring. It’s centripetal. Whereas inspiring the organization is about innovation, change, bringing a new identity to the organization. It’s centrifugal. For this out-of-the-box thinking, you can learn a lot from the real-world architects, who are not builders, but inventors of a new inspiring environment in which people can live and work. In my courses we start with a phase called Empathy, the feeling phase. If you are supposed to build an information system for a hospital, you need to first spend a week there as a patient, and then another week as a nurse, etc. Only then can you begin to think about the design of the information system. These are all concepts we take from architecture, from design, from the art world.

THE ECONOMY AND THE SOCIAL

UM: You are part of a Business School, so I want to ask you about the relationship between society, technology and the economy. A phrase I often quote suggests that before the economy was part of the social, whereas now (thanks in part to new media) the social is part of the economy. Is information management becoming the only means of making sense of the world?

RM: It’s true that digital technologies force us to reduce the whole world to digitized information. If you try to define, for instance, “safety” you try to define it in a very technical way in order to make it manageable. One example that comes to mind is the tram here in Amsterdam. They were supposed to give better service, and they reduced that to “being on time.” Soon, in the newspapers you started to see stories of the seeing-eye dog getting on the tram but the blind person being left behind, just so that the tram could leave on time! So there is a reductionism at work in the transition you mention. As part of this transition, we have gone form organizations thinking of themselves at the center of the world (and many still do), to a bottom-up society, where people do whatever they desire to do in changing combinations with other people. Sometimes they need the government for that, and sometimes they need a company, but basically it’s a society of individuals who look after their own interests. There, the role of the organization is reduced to certain moments in time. Does this mean that information management becomes the only means for making sense of the world? It depends on what you mean by information management. It needs to involve vision, responsibility, a responsibility for being in the world, for creating a world with more possibilities than we received ourselves… It also depends on what you mean by information. For me, information is a very rich concept, involving emotional aspects as well, not just what you put in computers.

FROM TRANSACTIONS TO RELATIONS

UM: You write in An Integrative Perspective on Information Management (PDF):

“The vision presupposed in IM (information management) is that of a business resource. This is basically an economic perspective: information can be traded (and becomes more and more tradable through digitalisation) and complies with specific economic laws… In addition to this exclusively economic perspective, one can study information also from a socio-constructivistic point of view: here, information is a social construct that derives its value from and gives value to the (subjective) context in which it is used… IM is [being transformed] into management of meaning” (2007).

Can you elaborate on why sense making is so important today?

RM: If you are supposed to make choices in a situation of abundance, as opposed to a situation of scarcity, then you have the luxury of making those choices based on your identity. In a situation of scarcity, you are more or less obliged to take one or another position. With abundance, your decisions are shaped by who you are, what kind of people you know, what you want to be in the world, etc. So first you have to be able to make sense of that information about your self, your identity. ICT’s have made very poor use of that information so far, I think. We have to make an effort to put more meaning into the way we use information in an organization. Even computerized data could be a much more richer representation of reality than it is today. It’s shouldn’t just be a number, a name, and an address. It also goes back to inspiration in the organization. We don’t ask people to put their imagination and inspiration into the stuff they are organizing. Nowadays, we try to organize and manage innovation. But every company that is of interest today was born more or less out of coincidence, out of the inspiration of a small group of people.

UM: Do you think there is a trend towards seeing information as something that needs to be increasingly secured and protected? And what price will we pay in order to secure information?

RM: Information cannot be secured anymore. Organizations are becoming so open that if you send an email within the organization, in half an hour it can be distributed all over the Web. The CIO of a big Dutch company going through “downsizing” told me they found at least 120 public employee blogs discussing the situation. So the price you have to pay is probably that the decision of whom to trust will become a difficult one. Trust is in danger. How do we find trust in one another? That has to do also with what it means to belong to an organization. People don’t belong to organizations anymore, in the same way they used to. It’s a more volatile role, belonging to a number of communities, splitting yourself into a number of identities. We are transitioning from a period where transactions were very important to a period where relations are very important. ERP systems are based on the transactions between people, but these transactions are becoming less important, more anonymous. So you fall back on the kind of relations you have in the world. At the same time, in order to have relationships, you have to be interesting yourself! I believe the kind of world we are entering requires much more energy in order to be part of a community, much more initiative. It demands a lot, but it gives you a lot too. It’s a very interesting way of living!

The networked society and its outsides: Interview with Geert Lovink

(photo and interview: Ulises Mejias, Creative Commons 2008)

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, net critic and activist (bio, blog, publications). He is the founding director of the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures, where I sat with him to chat on May 22.

SEARCH ENGINES AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

Ulises Mejias: Have you heard about Rushmoredrive.com? It’s a search engine for the Black community. It’s in English, and I guess the idea is that it functions as a Google for Black people. Whatever search they perform, it’s going to organize and bring up results that the search engine thinks are of more interest or relevance to the user. And obviously the next step is that we have a search engine for Muslims, and a search engine for Gays, and a search engine for every minority. So I guess my question is basically: Will there still be margins within the information society when everybody has their own custom-designed search algorithm?

Geert Lovink: Well, one of the margins is the relative drop of the importance of English on the Web because of the growing presence of other languages. It’s a relatively small group of people who speak English and so its influence is shrinking very rapidly. That’s a fact. If we look at the search engine market, there are very serious competitors to Google, and they are not where we might look. The biggest one is Baidu, which is in Mandarin only. Google has no entrance to the Chinese market to speak of, and it’s the fastest growing market of internet users. Is that a margin? No. Is Baidu going to focus on a certain type of identity? No…

UM: You don’t think that market is going to segment itself according to different Chinese identities (cultural, ethnic, sexual, etc.)?

GL: No. I don’t think so. The world of the Internet is going to be divided into large language groups to start with. But I don’t see language as an identity… I don’t think we’ll get very far if we think of English, Spanish, Arab, Mandarin or Hindi as ‘identity.’ That’s not very useful. I associate language with something else, with a general vehicle for communication. What you are talking about –these marginal niche markets for search engines– are very interesting, but the really interesting sub segments of the search engine market are focusing on something else. For instance: image search. Can you search an image that is not tagged based on image patterns? I want to see all the fragments where someone is wearing a red hat. So now we are seeing search engines coming up that focus on these kinds of queries.

UM: Specialized searches, like 0xdb?

GL: Right. Yes. It’s a niche market. It’s focusing on a general audience, but very likely not everybody is going to use it, or understand how to make use of these specific search technologies.

UM: So you think identity-based search engines are going to suffer the same fate of identity-based politics? There’s a limit to how useful they’ll be?

GL: And also they are language-based, so that puts a big limit on them. Unless of course they are going to multiply themselves in other language areas. Otherwise it’s going to be a very small pool of users.

ALTERNATIVES TO THE NETWORK

UM: This is what you wrote in Blogging, the nihilist impulse: “blogs are witnessing and documenting the diminishing power of mainstream media, but they have consciously not replaced its ideology with an alternative.” You continue to say that “there is a sense that the Network is the alternative” but at the same time you question this alternative and say that users have nowhere else to go. You write: “There is no other world… What’s declining is the Belief in the Message. That is the nihilist moment, and blogs facilitate this culture as no platform has ever done before.” So, I was interested in comparing this notion of having nowhere else to go with Galloway and Thacker’s concept in The Exploit of an anti-web, something which they say we haven’t even begun to conceptualize…

GL: Well, I very much hope so, that there will be something like that. You can dream of something, whether it is utopian, dystopian, or alternative, subcultural or subversive, but that’s not what I was thinking about when I wrote that. Of course, there is an implicit reference that another world is possible. But I don’t think that this other world can be achieved merely through the design of alternative media spaces. I don’t think activists believe that through alternative media practices they can achieve their political goals, or set up structures –social and economic– such that capitalism will be reformed. I see very clearly the limits of the network discourse as such. When it comes to the formation of social movements or political forces in general, I see it more the other way around, and I’ve always seen it the other way around: that political forces come into being first, and then interact with the current media. And if there are groups within these movements that make clever use of the new media of their time, we can see very interesting uses. But I’ve never seen it the other way around, and I think it’s very naïve to believe that through Second Life or the blogosphere or whatever, that we can come to new political formations. At best we can speak of interesting subcultures or subcurrents, I think that’s possible. But we cannot have this kind of utopian idea, that these media products that we buy somehow embed some alternative future. No. We know what they embed. They are hard core architectures that have been designed by IT engineers and so on. They are not futuristic structures for a better world. If only it was like that! But we know enough about the people who design these machines, the circumstances under which they are produced, to know that they are an exact mirror of our society, at best.

UM: Is it necessary to stand outside the network in order to critique it?

GL: I think these days people would see it as a radical politics, or at least a challenge, to imagine a daily existence on the net without [companies like] Google… That’s our challenge. To imagine that. Can we position ourselves outside the “cloud”? Can we build alternative data centers that will not be surveilled? These are real questions.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND NEW MEDIA

UM: In The Principle of Notworking you quote Hardt and Negri’s argument that it takes a network to fight a network. But then you write that “networks might be an unsuitable form to win a fight… network discourse cannot integrate –let alone imagine– outside point of views.” Can you elaborate on that?

GL: This is a serious question for activists and social movements, which tend to be 10 to 15 years behind, so they are quite unfamiliar with the network logic, they haven’t seriously engaged with it. So there is not a radical critique of the network, unfortunately. If they are unfamiliar with the network discourse, with the network episteme, what’s going to happen? Some elements are going to be adopted, maybe. Obviously not the very widespread social networking practices, as we know them. It’s hilarious to think of a social networking site for activists, it’s just not going to happen. The paranoia is so widespread.

UM: Really? You don’t think that has already happened? I’m thinking of sites like TrueMajority or MoveOn. They think of themselves as networks, and using the power of networks…

GL: But not using contemporary tools. They envision themselves as networks, but in a different way. They take certain elements of the network, but they also distance themselves from the everyday use. It’s a bit funny. A lot of social movements throughout the last century thrived on the energy, the creativity and the imagination of young people. But these new networks are not tapping into the creativity of young users. That’s weird!

UM: Maybe some people within those movements have tried, but I think they run into the problem you’ve identified elsewhere: how do we facilitate large-scale [networked] conversations that do not only make sense but also have an impact?

GL: Or how can we have a small conversation without having to suffer all the time from the suspicion that authorities are tapping into the conversation for their own use. Most social movements since the rise of neoliberalism have been marginalized, and still are. So to have the self-confidence to break out of these limitations, and still stick to the agenda of radical politics… these are two things that don’t go together very well. So radical politics limits itself, therefore, to very strict offline engagements and events.

UM: Do you think maybe in the end that will be beneficial to them? Maybe they won’t spend so many resources chasing a dream that won’t materialize?

GL: It’s possible, but there is still a big problem with that, in that you do not really allow yourself to grow into a popular movement. And there are plenty of opportunities where small movements can transform themselves into popular movements: anti-war, healthcare, etc. And that requires new and effective ways of communicating as well.

ETHICS AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF SYSTEMS

UM: I’ve been thinking about the impact of Napster on ethics, and how within a short period of time, the code regulating a particular ethical standard was redefined, affecting masses of people. Do you think technosocial networks will usher in an age of viral ethics, with one code of ethics overruled by another, and another?

GL: That’s what we’ve seen happening. When I hear the word ‘ethics’ I think of the tragic decline of netiquette, and how Napster replaced that. Well defined codes of conduct were more or less in place within a group of internet users that still had direct or indirect contact with the first generation of those who designed the architectures and consequently the ethics that came with them. And in the late 1990’s we’ve seen these netiquette rules collapsing, because they could not be reproduced any more from one person to the next. That chain fell apart, because of the rapid growth. It was not possible anymore, as it was possible in 1995, to introduce users to the do’s and don’t’s… And instead, as you say, these large systems of anonymous exchange, like Napster, suddenly appeared; mass anonymity, not one singular person as “the” anonymous person, but mass anonymity, which creates this kind of breakdown of rules. And nothing else replaced it, to be honest.

UM: But aren’t masses on their way to becoming ’smart mobs’ with the help of these social network technologies?

GL: The one thing you can say is that media events are creating these temporary masses, but they are mass manufactured, in fact. A lot of the social protests we see these days already have this extreme temporality, a complete lack of any sustainable structure. That’s a given of political life today, that these movements and these events come up very quickly, a lot of people gather, and then they fall apart. We’ve seen that happening in “real” life, in cities, but we’ve seen that happening on the Internet as well. Very rapid growth and disintegration of these structures, sometimes even within days. Short lived, but at a mass scale.

UM: And useful?

GL: Well, they can have an impact, indeed. So useful, yes, but sometimes without enduring consequences.

(photo: CC by sandydr)

Considering that Amsterdam is situated two meters below sea level, the Dutch have really done a magnificent job not at “fighting” nature but rather incorporating it into the function and aesthetics of the city. While doing a research fellowship in this beautiful city, I decided to conduct a series of informal interviews with theorists, educators, artists and activists to learn how they are applying some of the same ingenuity at figuring out how new information and communication technologies are transforming the fabric of society.

The interviews:

• Geert Lovink: Founding Director, Institute of Network Cultures
• Rik Maes: Program Director, PrimaVera
• Marc Worrell: Software Architect, Mediamatic
• Anne Beaulieu and Sally Wyatt: Senior Researchers, Virtual Knowledge Studio
• Rob van Kranenburg: Head of the Public Domain Program, Waag Society

The theme of the conference was summarized as follows:

Has there been a shift in political use of the internet and digital new media – a new web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards web 2.0 impact, if at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the communication of politics and policy? Does web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for researchers to share and debate perspectives.

The conference was in large part the brainchild of Andrew Chadwick, Founding Director of the NPCU. There were 120 papers organised into 41 panels, and over 180 participants from over 30 countries. Some of the conference topics included: Parties, Elections and Campaigning; e-Governance; Constituency, Mobilisation and Engagement; The Politics of Blogging; Platforms, Power, and Politics; Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation; New Perspectives on e-Democracy; and Theorising Web 2.0.

What follows is a review of some of the presentations I found relevant to my interests (a summary of my paper is provided towards the end).

In his keynote, Stephen Coleman (Professor of Political Communication and Director of Research at the Institute for Communications Studies, University of Leeds) established the connection between politics and technology by arguing that the public is always constructed through mediation. But the ways in which technology and politics shape each other is anything but straightforward. Instead of simply asking “Does Web 2.0 help or hinder citizenship?” we should investigate the emergence of Web 2.0 as a discourse that re-orients citizenship itself. If citizenship is a creative act of self-representation, the opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 technologies would seem to open up a multiplicity of networked spaces for defining our political place in society (blogs, YouTube videos, Facebook groups, etc.). But according to Coleman, democracy requires commons as well as networks. Real political action requires that we go “beyond the ghetto of our Facebooks friends” to build platforms of solidarity or disagreement.

This issue of whether Web 2.0 allows for the creation of authentic commons or merely aggregates isolated individuals into interest-based networks was a recurring theme in the conference. For instance, Bernhard Rieder (Of People and Algorithms: Web 2.0 and the Production of Visibility) argued that the “wisdom of the crowd” is in fact a socio-technical construct that “represents a new arrangement for producing visibility and structuring public discourse.” In his paper, Rieder examines how Web 2.0 redistributes control over information flows and argues that “the democratic potential of this shift is counterbalanced by technological blackboxing, privatization and delusion of accountability.” Along the same lines, Jussi Parikka (Web 2.0 and Politics of Attention, Sociability and Capture) states:

“In a certain sense, much of the discourse around several web 2.0 applications is based on a forgetting, or assumption of “naturalness” in terms of “the sociability” of the people involved and the transparency of the media technological tools.”

One of the perils, then, is that before we get to question how meaningful is the kind of participation that Web 2.0 makes possible, democracy might be redefined to fit the affordances of the technology: Democracy is as Web 2.0 does. After all, as Tarleton Gillespie (WikiCandidate, Political Discourse and the Peculiarities of the Technological) pointed out, “democracy has had to evolve alongside the communication technologies taken up in its service.” Gillespie offered a model for differentiating between stated, materialized and symbolized participation, which can be useful in the analysis of actual participation v. a “sense” of participation. In the end, however, he argued that the promise of participation can’t be manufactured by Web 2.0 technology; it needs to be actualized through the involvement of the users. His presentation focused on some of the features of wikis as they relate to the formation of publics. For instance: Does the Revert function encourage dismissal of opinions? Does the “finished” look of wiki pages discourage dialogue?

Another common belief is that Web 2.0 can promote democracy by simply enlarging the visibility of marginalized voices. While Sandra González-Bailón (The Importance of Gaining an Audience: Visibility and Reach on the Web 2.0 Age) argued that there is “no democratization without visibility,” she cast some doubts on the claims that Web 2.0 can guarantee a larger audience. She observes:

“Gaining users’ attention is still the most crucial, albeit scarce, commodity online; web 2.0 might have widened the pool of producers, but consumers still manage a narrow scope of attention, which inevitably concentrates on a minority of sources.”

This is somewhat at odds with the scenario documented by Jonah Bossewitch (The ZyprexaKills Campaign: Peer Production and the Frontiers of Radical Pedagogy), in which a small committed group of decentralized activists used a combination of modern collaboration technologies (wikis, public tagging, Bittorrent, and Tor) to organize their resistance to Lilly’s attempts to suppress evidence surrounding the secondary effects of Eli Lilly’s blockbuster antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. According to Bossewitch,

This story suggests models for the purposeful deployment of emerging technologies by social justice movements, and demonstrates the strong symbiotic relationship between new and traditional media. [The case also exemplifies] some of the issues surrounding whistle-blowing in an era of omniscient surveillance, the relationship between anonymity and free speech, and the politics of memory.

But while Web 2.0 technologies might be efficient at organizing the work that decentralized anonymous activists undertake, its potential to coordinate in real-time the actions of a group for the purpose of creating social change (another one of the claims often associated with new information and communication technologies) needs to be contested. Joss Hands (Mobil(e)ising the Multitude: the Political Significance of Mobility in Contemporary Protest and Resistance Movements), for instance, pointed out that while mobile communications have facilitated the organisation of individuals into groups for the purpose of political protest and resistance (a scenario commonly associated with Howard Rheingold’s notion of the ‘Smart Mob’ or Hardt and Negri’s concept of ‘Multitude’), the emphasis on speed that these technologies introduce might be detrimental to the emergence and enactment of political will. He asks whether

“this necessarily produces an emphasis on the ‘mob’ element, or rather allows for a genuine ‘smartness’, thus, what is the distinction here between the multiple and the singular? And, what does it mean to be a political actor in such circumstances?”

The four papers in my panel on Theorising Web 2.0 continued to explore many of these questions from the perspective of the politics of power. Marcus Breen (Uncivil Society: Political Power Making in Web 2.0) began by poking holes on the utopian ideal of an equal-opportunity global communications network. He used a number of case studies (including one featuring Karl Rove discussing the use of email “e-blasts” by the Republican Party) to illustrate “how the culturally liberating possibilities of Web 2.0 may be circumvented and undermined by subterfuge in policy making and infrastructure control.” Underneath the rhetoric of openness, he argues, lies the reality that “the power deployed by political and business elites may produce models of society that are defined by their “uncivil” characteristics, reinforcing the view that civil society itself is a contested terrain.”

Meanwhile, Christian Fuchs (Social Theory Foundations of Social Software and the Web: From Web 1.0 towards Web 2.0 and Web 3.0) offered a model for tracing the potential in various generations of Web technologies for cognitive, communicative and cooperative affordances. What is at stake is the power to define the Web as a technology of competition or cooperation.

To David Berry (Web X.0: Politics as Imagined Technology) that struggle begins with the power to give meaning to the construct of something called “Web 2.0″, “Web 3.0″ or whatever. More than mere marketing terms, for him these names suggest that technology is a form of “imagined politics.” What Web 2.0 imagines, if we are to believe the literature from Silicon Valley, is an environment where actors are brought together to actualize new and revolutionary democratic potentials, where technology can ‘enhance’ or ‘improve’ democracy and freedom. However, it is interesting to note that

“the notions normally associated with Web 2.0 technologies, particularly those related to efficiency, speed, precise measurement, rationality and productivity would previously have been rejected as inappropriate to the realization of democratic debate and political action.”

In my own paper (Ulises Mejias, Social Networks and the Politics of Nodocentrism), I attempted to explore the politics of the network as episteme. As social networks are actualized by information and communication technologies (ICTs), they cease to function as mere metaphors and become templates for organizing sociality. Networks –as assemblages of people, technology and social norms– arrange subjects into structures and define the parameters for their interaction, thus actively shaping their social realities. But what does the social network include, and what is left out?

By definition, social networks are not anti-social, but they manifest a bias (which I term “nodocentrism”) against engaging anything that is not part of the network. There are two properties of networks that explain nodocentrism. First: the distance between two nodes within the same network is zero. Second: the distance between a node and something outside the network is practically infinite. Nodocentrism embodies a politics of exclusion, since in order for something to be relevant or even visible within the network it needs to be rendered as a node. In other words, nodocentrism is a reductionism that eliminates everything but the reality of the node. Nodocentrism informs a model of progress or development where things not on the network must and should be incorporated in order for them to exist (we find this ideology in the discourses of the digital divide, pervasive computing, etc.).

While nodocentrism makes for very efficient networks, I’m interested in what happens when it is used to define the social in networks owned and controlled by corporations. The problem then is that the criteria for inclusion, the power to name the social, rests disproportionately with network owners, not network users. Technosocial networks owned by corporations are like shopping malls in the sense that they re-inscribe the public unto a privatized space. The economy is no longer part of society; society is now part of the economy (Vandenberghe, 2002). In my presentation, I suggested a model for helping us think about the inequalities and injustices that result from using the privatized network as template for the social. This model follows the stages of development of a network.

The first stage is network growth. Networks start small, linking two lonely nodes, but their growth is exponential and explosive. Networks grow by adding or assimilating nodes. But what political function does the explosive growth of technosocial networks serve? Does it benefit network users and owners equally?

Networks don’t grow haphazardly, they follow certain rules. The rule that has the most impact is Preferential Attachment: Given the choice to link to a node with fewer links and a node with more links, we will choose to link to the one with more links. This means that in the long run, rich nodes get richer and rich networks get richer (this is the second stage).

Preferential attachment in technosocial networks leads to hyperinflation, a form of massive network growth that widens the gap between rich nodes and the rest of the nodes (the third stage). The presence of rich nodes or hubs benefits network owners, as hubs attracts more nodes through preferential attachment, and the network gets bigger. What is hyperinflated is social capital, meaning that the value of social networks is artificially inflated in order to attract more nodes. The goal of hyperinflation is to increase profit: bigger network membership means more eyes exposed to advertising, and a guaranteed rate of growth. But hyperinflation cannot be sustained indefinitely.

The excess of hyperinflation often leads to a bursting of the bubble. But market crashes can be good for business. In this stage of the development of the network, capitalization is used to convert inequality into gain for a few and loss for the rest. The privatized network is a commodity that can be exchanged and capitalized, and along with it the identity and content of all those users.

For the most part, capitalization goes unnoticed. Most people don’t care who owns the network, as long as they can use it for “free” (they are unaware of the cost they pay for this “free” service). But capitalization can also create discontent, at which time (the last stage) network owners are faced with a decision: tolerate a certain amount of sabotage from unhappy users, or purge the unwanted nodes from the network. The exercise of control over network membership is crucial at this point. The elimination of nodes requires complex forms of network collusion and transference. In other words, data from one network can be used to control membership in another network (for instance, information found on Facebook can be used to fire workers or expel students).

Corporations and governments engage in small daily acts of network purging: They cancel accounts, deny licenses, engage in surveillance, suspend service, modify terms of use, and trespass users’ rights. The way to secure the network is to assume a perpetual state of insecurity, which constantly requires new and improved methods for the purging of potentially unwanted nodes.

I ended my presentation by proposing the concept of the “paranodal,” the expanse between nodes, as the only possible site from which to un-think the logic of nodocentrism. Paranodality can provide the subject with the political context for disidentifying from the network, offering a site for the critical assessment of networked sociality. Of course, to unthink the logic of the network is not to pretend the network doesn’t exist, or to refuse to deal with it, but to re-imagine one’s relationship to it. The relationship of the paranode to the network is perhaps like the one of the parasite to the host (here I’m borrowing from Michel Serres): the parasite inserts itself into the communication process, between the sender and the receiver, disrupting the communication by being “noise”, and forcing the system to adjust to its presence. In this context, the paranode can be described as a parasite of the network, an element that lodges itself between nodes, distorting or introducing noise into the information that passes between nodes, and forcing the network –whether it acknowledges the paranode’s existence or not– to adjust to its presence. In my work, I attempt to theorize how this parasitical disruption can provide a way to think outside the logic of the network, to disidentify from it, and to resist its nodocentric view of the world.

Apparently there was a revolution, and I almost missed it.

This is what happened: Somebody cracked and published the encryption key that unlocks HD DVDs, allowing for the copying of the discs. The code started appearing on various websites. The Motion Picture Association of America and the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS LA) began issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violation notices. Some websites attempted to censor the publication of the code. There was a massive reaction from users towards this apparent act of censorship: the more the code was being “suppressed,” the more it appeared on web sites, blogs, t-shirts, songs, etc. [For a detailed account of the controversy, see the Wikipedia article.]

I found this interesting for a couple of reasons.

The first is the way in which Web 2.0 companies have had to negotiate a balance between their corporate interest and the interests of their users. As you probably know already, after its initial attempt to censor the posts containing the code (and the subsequent ‘revolt’ by users), Digg reversed its decision and said that it would rather “go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company.” As Andrew Lih writes:

This is quite unprecedented — you basically have a multi-million dollar enterprise intimidated by its mob community into taking a stance that is rather clearly against the law.

But what you have, actually, is a Web 2.0 company (reportedly worth around $200 million USD) doing a cost-benefit analysis and realizing that losing its user base would pose a higher and more immediate risk than facing the possibility of lawsuits from “a bigger company” (I cannot help but wonder what would happen if the cost-benefit analysis does not favor the users…).

The second aspect that I find fascinating about this whole thing is the way in which the dissemination of the encryption code has been constructed as a revolutionary, subversive act —as an example of what cyber revolt looks like (establishment, beware!). I was surprised to see many of the people I read online immediately jump on the bandwagon, and gleefully proclaim our revolutionary duty to publish the numbers (one actual quote: “Hahahaha! I am breaking federal law! Hahahaha!”).

Now, I’m no friend of the DMCA. Also, I believe that breaking the law can be a powerful statement if the right social cause is invoked… But a DVD encryption key? Why not refuse to pay taxes to protest the war, or something like that? Perhaps the nature of the revolt can be explained by the demographics of the “revolutionaries”: according to Businessweek, 94% of Digg’s army of free labor are male, over 50% are IT workers in their 20s and 30s, and they earn $75,000 a year or more. Ryan Shaw calls ‘em as he sees ‘em:

While most of the blogosphere was atwitter over the tantrums being thrown at Digg, real injustice in Los Angeles was being ignored. After watching this video [of Police oppression during the May 1st immigration reform march] I was ashamed to be part of a community (the designers and evangelists of “Web 2.0?) which sanctimoniously promotes “people power” among the spoiled and entitled while disregarding the tightening grip of authority on the poor and disenfranchised. [see his post for links to video and newspaper articles]

We keep hearing that social media tools will help to bring about social change. So are we being overly critical of the tools just because of the communities that presently wield them? This whole affair might have at its core something rather trivial (a code to hack DVDs), but can we extrapolate some of the lessons and techniques learned to a social justice context? Or as Ethan Zuckerman asks:

What would it take to harness this sort of viral spread to harness the net in spreading human rights information? Can activists learn from the story of The Number and find ways to spread information that otherwise is suppressed or ignored in mainstream media?

I wonder what activists would compromise in this transition to cyber revolt. To begin, I doubt that experienced activists believe that all it takes is for suppressed information to reach the public. Brecht suggested that “He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.” Today, however, he who laughs has indeed heard the bad news, but from The Daily Show.

But the thing I believe anyone interested in social change should explore more carefully are the kinds of action that information can be transformed into as it is communicated. Perhaps, as Tiziana Terranova explains in Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (2004, Pluto Press), what we call “information” already embodies a certain containment of openness:

The first condition of a successful communication becomes that of reducing all meaning to information —that is to a signal that can be successfully replicated across a varied communication milieu with minimum alterations. (Terranova, 2004, p. 16)

When activism is defined solely in terms of the exchange of information, we are reducing the options available for acting. That is how an encryption key (information in its purest form) was easily converted into a “subversive message” whose replication and dissemination was seen as a revolutionary act. As long as we’ve had media —and I’m afraid emerging “social” media don’t pose a significant alternative— we’ve seen this dynamic: the replication of information has itself come to define what it means to act, has become the source of meaning. The individual goes from being a social actor to an intersection of information flows. She possesses more information than ever before (about global warming, about genocidal poverty, about the false pretenses under which wars are started), but all she can do is replicate and pass on this information. The purer the information (09 F9 …), the more efficient the activism.