The first one is titled “Brought to you by Twitter: Revolutions and Social Media Monopsonies,” to be presented on November 4 at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in Cleveland.

I’m also giving the plenary address at the 23rd Annual Peace Studies Conference: Globalized Restructuring, New Media, and Mobilization. The talk is titled “Liberation Technology, Popular Uprisings, and Neoliberal Ideology.” The talk is on Nov. 12 at Le Moyne College, Syracuse. I believe it will be Skyped for those who cannot attend in person. The registration form is here (pdf).

If you are attending either one of these events, please let me know!

I will be participating at the 96th Annual Convention of the National Communication Association (Sunday, Nov 14 – Wednesday Nov 17, 2010, San Francisco).

The session is titled Media Ecology on the New Media Frontier and is sponsored by the Media Ecology Association.

It will be held Wednesday Nov 17 – 8:00am – 9:15am at the Parc 55 Hotel, Balboa Room.

Session Participants:

Chair: Robert MacDougall (Curry College)
Respondent: David Linton (Marymount Manhattan College)
Papers:

Mapping Experience: Chorographical Representations of Place in Google Maps
Lauren Elizabeth Clark (North Carolina State University)

Many-to-One: Social Media and the Rise of the Monopsony
Ulises Mejias (SUNY Oswego)

Becoming Bombs: 3D Satellite Imagery and the Weaponization of the Eye
Roger Stahl (University of Georgia)

Exploring the News Ecosystem
Christine Tracy (Eastern Michigan University)

Even though I had the difficult task of presenting the “dissenting” view, I learned a lot from participating in the session and I really enjoyed meeting the folks at Georgetown. Here’s the blurb about the event from the website:

Social media tools have gained widespread use across our campuses in a very short time. Many academic disciplines are also adopting these online tools as they embrace collaboration and interactivity. The implications of these developments are profound–not only for scholars and students but also for the potential transformation of the teaching and learning process. How do social media networks change the way our students learn and our faculty teach? How is the traditional classroom relationship altered? Are students becoming more active and engaged learners? The speakers were Gerry McCartney, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO and Oesterle Professor of Information Technology, Purdue University; Edward Maloney, Director of Research and Learning Technology at the Center for New Designs in Leaning and Scholarship and Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Georgetown University; and Ulises Mejias, Assistant Professor of New Media in the Communication Studies Department at the State University of New York at Oswego.

You can also download the video directly from iTunes U.

You should also take a look at the iDC listserv for a continuing discussion about these topics.

The texts and videos of the lectures and keynotes presented during the 4th Inclusiva-net Meeting: P2P Networks and Processes (July 6 through 10, 2009) are now available for download!

My paper, Peerless: The Ethics of P2P Network Disassembly, is available here (o si deseas la versión en español esta aqui). The video of the lecture is also available.

Other noteworthy presentations:

• Ál Cano Santana: Guifi.net: Peer-to-peer network and Free Social Web for collective empowerment
• Juan Martín Prada: P2P Networks and Processes: Beyond the Logics of Exchange
• Michel Bauwens: Conditions for the Radicality of P2P Paradigm
• Andrew Whelan: Leeching Bataille: peer-to-peer Potlatch and the Acephalic Response
• Bodó Balázs: Movie Piracy and (the Lack of) Cinemas in Hungary

And while you are at it, check out the sites of some of the cool people I met there or the amazing organizations I got to learn about:

• Alfonso y Co.
• Ignacio de Castro
• Universidad Nomada
• Platoniq
• Patio Maravillas
• Kirsty Boyle
• Maria PTQK

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.

I’ll be presenting a paper at this year’s SUNY Conference on Instructional Technology (CIT 2009).

Active Learning, Social Media, and Serious Games: Case Studies
Dr. Ulises A. Mejias
Friday May 22, 10:15 – 10:45 am
Alternate Reality Games, played with everyday communication and information technologies, can be used as forms of active learning and research that involve students in analyzing a real-life problem, collectively articulating a multitude of realistic and possible responses to it, and addressing the ethical imperative for action.

Also, some of you might be interested in the webcast of the keynote by Liz Lawley (of mamamusings fame). Dr. Elizabeth Lane Lawley is Director of the Lab for Social Computing and Associate Professor of Information Technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She will be giving two talks on Thursday May 21 (free and open to the online public, as far as I can tell): Technology – Technical, Tangible, Social (10:15am ET) and Gaming and Learning (2:15 pm ET). To watch, go here.

‘Stop Gold Farming!’ is an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) developed for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. It could be called an experiment in collective storytelling, a radical new media project, or an internet ‘hoax’ with a social message! Anyone can play (participants interact with the narrative in real-time using a variety of communication technologies such as email, blogs, SMS, digital video, podcasts, etc.), and therefore anyone can shape the outcome. The game revolves around a fictional controversy unfolding at Ithaca College related to the issue of gold farming, or the practice of selling virtual goods that can be used in massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy. These goods are often produced under sweatshop conditions in developing countries for the consumption of First World clients. ‘Stop Gold Farming!’ is the story of a student organization demanding that an IC student engaged in the distribution of virtual goods be expelled from the college. As part of the ‘Trade’ stream of FLEFF, the goal of this ARG is to engage students and festival participants in an exploration of gold farming as an embodied economic practice in a gaming context characterized by virtuality and disembodiment, and in the context of globalization and trade as a process that reinforces “unequal human relations rather than merely intensifying connectedness” (Biao, 2008). By framing the experience as an ARG, this FLEFF LAB involves various communities in analyzing a real-life problem, collectively articulating a multitude of realistic and possible responses to it, and examining the ethical question of what form action should take after the game. This FLEFF LAB was conceptualized and is being coordinated by Prof. Ulises Mejias from SUNY Oswego, and produced in collaboration with FLEFF interns. You can join the experience by visiting stopgoldfarming.wordpress.com. You can also join us on April 3 from 9:00 to 10:30 AM in the Park soundstage (Ithaca College) for a discussion that will include a gold farming demo and a live conference call with a team of researchers in China.

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.