The Limits of Networks as Models for Organizing the Social. In the journal New Media & Society, (12) 4, 603-617. Subscription required to download, but your school might have a license.

Also, the Spanish version of the e-book for the 4th Inclusiva.net Meeting: P2P Networks and Processes (Madrid, 6-10 July 2009) just came out (English version coming soon). It contains my article Peerless: The Ethics of P2P Network Disassembly (pp. 56-66), along with many other excellent pieces. And it’s a free download!

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.

Check it out! It’s going to be active for another couple of weeks.

As most of you have heard, our campus is getting ready to migrate our email system to Google sometime in the Fall. The move seems like a sweet deal: we get not just better functioning email, but a full menu of apps including calendaring, document creation and sharing, file storage, and chat — all at no cost! On top of that, the services offered through Google Apps for Education come with no adds, 2.5 gigs of storage, and you get to keep your oswego.edu email tag, from what I hear. What’s not to like?

Well, plenty, if you ask me. But before I share my concerns, let me disclose two important facts: One, I myself use certain Google products (who doesn’t?). Two, I have a lot of respect for the people who made the decision to migrate to Google, and I understand the reasons why the switch is pretty much inevitable. Thus, this is not an attempt to reverse the decision (even if we could afford to), but simply to bring more awareness about what life under our Google overlords might mean.

In my Media Economics class, we discuss the positive and negative impacts of having a handful of media corporations control pretty much everything we see and hear. It’s easy to see the inordinate power that companies like News Corp, Disney or Time Warner have on our daily lives. But Google is soon going to make those companies look like charming mom and pop operations. Google is creating a monoculture where people believe Google is all they need. Think about the impact of having one company control all the software for your computer and your mobile phone, and one company handling all your personal data, tracking everything you do through its suite of information and media products and keeping the data for up to 18 months.

What does Google want to do with all that data? Figure out how to better direct advertisements to you, of course! Let’s not forget that Google, a company with a market value of $200 billion, derives 97% of its revenue from advertising. The more Google knows about you, the better it can target ads at you and make more money — and Google wants to know EVERYTHING about you! This perhaps explains why the company has a venture capital arm that is currently investing in biotech, genetics, energy, telecom, healthcare, and other things. So while switching to GMail doesn’t mean that we will start seeing adds for Viagra or teeth whitening products next to our Inbox, it does probably mean that Google will be scanning our emails and documents in an effort to collect more information about us, their users.

In essence this means that by using Google, all SUNY Oswego community members will effectively be working to increase the company’s bottom line. Now, perhaps I’m fooling myself by thinking that because I CHOOSE to use certain Google products, I can exercise some control and responsibility. But being forced to use ALL Google products is quite a different matter (what’s the alternative? not using email at school?). And this is another feature of life under oligopolies, that while seeming to open up more choices, the arena for choice is actually being limited. Furthermore, by using Google we are effectively endorsing its corporate policies on privacy, security and intellectual property issues. This is problematic at best, for reasons I don’t have the time to get into right now.

Yes, plenty of universities have already jumped on the bandwagon and saved tons on money. Arizona State is saving $500,000 a year. University of Washington laid off 66 IT workers (although that’s not necessarily a good thing, is it?). But a few schools are having serious concerns. The faculty union at Lakehead University, for instance, filed a grievance citing concerns about privacy and academic freedom. Apparently those cooky Canadians are worried that since Google is a US company, it is obligated to hand over any data that the US government wants to see, like faculty’s emails. You might be thinking: “We don’t have to worry about that! We are in the US and already subject to warrant-less surveillance!” Well, it is Google’s obligations to OTHER countries that worries Yale University, who recently decided to postpone its migration to Google because of concerns about cloud computing. You see, in order to have some data redundancy, Google stores your personal information randomly in 3 of its 450,000 servers located all over the world. So the folks at Yale are wondering whether Google is obligated to surrender your data according to the laws of THOSE countries. In other words, if my email data is stored in Israel or Malaysia, does that give those governments the right to monitor it? (of course, even if Google wants to protect your data, the fact of the matter is that it is a more alluring target for hackers than a small state college, as demonstrated recently when some users’ GMail accounts were broken into by Chinese hackers).

In the end, I suppose Google is no more evil or no less evil than Apple, Microsoft, or any other media company. Yes, it is quickly becoming a bigger monopoly, and that’s probably not good for the public OR for the market. But what troubles me more about our migration to Google is what it says about the increasing privatization of education, and our failure to support and fund the public university. Maybe it’s naive to think that public education can remain free of for-profit interests. But it will certainly be more difficult to maintain that separation now that we will all be working for Google.

(cross post with FLEFF’s Dissassembled Spaces blog)

Most people assume that if you Google something in the US and you do the same in another country, you will get the same results. It’s called the World Wide Web, right? Not so. Countries can and do exert influence on search engine companies to control the results that their citizens can access. Which is why there’s been a lot of talk recently about whether Google will pull out of China. Apparently, the Internet giant whose code of conduct is “Don’t be evil” has finally gotten tired of the Chinese Communist Party stipulating the kind of search results it can or cannot provide. Competing for a share of one of the world’s largest markets is good and well, but after it was revealed that the attacks that compromised the private information of thousands of Google users came from China, the company decided that enough was enough. Although no final decision has been made, the mere mention that Google was considering leaving China was major news.

In the West, the move has been celebrated as a slap in the face of internet censorship. At the same time, there have been concerns that the withdrawal of Google from the Chinese market will make things worse for people there. The assumption is that Google’s services do provide a little bit of freedom inside the great firewall of China (one theory behind the cause of the cyber attacks on Google is that the Chinese government was interested in spying on dissidents’ Gmail accounts). This would seem to suggest, to put it plainly, that Google and the rest of the big Web companies are important tools in the struggle to spread freedom and democracy in China and elsewhere in the world (recall the recent hubbub about Twitter saving Iran, Facebook liberating Moldova, etc.).

To build momentum for this idea, Google’s announcement was followed a couple of days later by a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The topic was Internet Freedom. Because of its importance in facilitating communication and dialogue across various divides, Secretary Clinton argued that the US government is interested in ensuring that the Internet remains Free. “We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas,” she said.

But what does this “single Internet” that the US government is interested in promoting look like? We need to take a closer look and ask questions. Simply sticking the word Free in front of something and saying it’s good for world democracy is not enough. Remember a little something called the Free Market? Just as that particular contraption was an important instrument in creating more global inequality, my fear is that the Free Internet –as envisioned by corporations and promoted by the US– will only allow the rich to get richer.

For one thing, is the US in a position to champion freedoms it itself is not willing to respect? During her speech, Clinton remarked: “As it stands, Americans can consider information presented by foreign governments. We do not block your attempts to communicate with the people in the United States. But citizens in societies that practice censorship lack exposure to outside views.” So what about the role of the US in preventing people in those countries from being exposed to certain views? I guess the Secretary of State had not been briefed on a recent bill approved by Congress that imposes sanctions on Arab satellite channels deemed hostile to the United States. If you want to block people from tuning in to the Hezbollah channel, at least don’t pretend that you are above using censorship to achieve your political ends.

Besides, does anyone really believe that ever-expanding corporate conglomerates are the best champions of democracy? Global capitalism’s track record seems to suggest otherwise. Just ask the people of the world what companies like Union Carbide, Dow, Shell, United Fruit, DuPont, Monsanto and so on and so on have done for their democracies. Given that history, companies that believe in Not Being Evil represent a complete and welcomed change, but I’m still not convinced that we should completely surrender our online public spaces and cultural products to corporations, specially when those spaces and products are important platforms for challenging authority. Secretary Clinton herself said that “…the internet can help humanity push back against those who promote violence and crime and extremism. In Iran and Moldova and other countries, online organizing has been a critical tool for advancing democracy and enabling citizens to protest suspicious election results.” But as Evgeny Morozov argues, the losses in online privacy that come from using “free” corporate-controlled social media tools may not be worth the gains in online mobilization.

Just don’t tell that to the State Department. At a 2009 Alliance of Youth Movements summit in Mexico City, where the supposed goal was to figure out ways to reduce drug-related violence, the co-sponsors (along with the US State Department) included Facebook, MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch), Google, YouTube, Pepsi and MTV. One doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to feel a bit troubled by what seemed like the perfect marriage of US foreign policy and for-profit interests, cloaked in the language of liberal democracy and its purported promotion of human rights and freedom. In an age when social network analysis is becoming an increasingly important tool for securing the homeland, what better way to keep an eye on the ‘volatile’ youth of the developing world than to have them voluntarily fill out detailed profiles of themselves and their friends? And if they can do that while drinking AMP Energy and watching Jersey Shore, so much the better, it seems.

Resources:

Authority, Meet Technology: Slate/New America Foundation discussion about China, Google, and Internet freedom.
http://www.slate.com/id/2241755/workarea/3/

Arab ministers slam US congress satellite decision
http://blogs.rnw.nl/medianetwork/arab-ministers-slam-us-congress-satellite-decision

Clinton urges Internet freedom, condemns cyber attacks
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60K1V220100121?type=technologyNews

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Remarks on Internet Freedom
http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135519.htm

Evgeny Morozov, Testimony to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
http://www.csce.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Files.Download&FileStore_id=1526

Privacy May Be a Victim in Cyberdefense Plan
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/us/politics/13cyber.html?_r=1

All your digital labour are belong to us.
The Daily’s Whitney Mallett explores the world of gold-farming: professional gaming and virtual trading

Below is the full exchange with the writer.

MGD: How does gold-farming re-map and reinforce repressive structures and global inequalities? Does it transcend these in any ways? Does it have the potential to?

UM: Virtual gold, or “gil,” might not be a tangible good like coffee or strawberries, but its exchange in the market is subjected to the same economic forces–which means that yes, there is the potential for this practice to replicate the inequalities inherent in capitalism. At a fundamental level, we are talking about supply and demand here: someone doesn’t have the time to collect all that gil, but they’ve got the money, and someone else has got the time and needs the money. But then we have to look at it as a global trade issue as well: some parts of the world have a “comparative advantage” when it comes to supplying cheap labor — the question of course is why. It is not accidental that the videogame players are sitting in North America and Europe, while most of the gil collectors (they don’t like being called “gold farmers” — it’s a pejorative term to them) are sitting in China or Indonesia. So it is unavoidable to talk about global inequalities when we talk about gold farming. Does the practice have the potential to transcend these inequalities? Maybe so. According to the interviews I’ve seen, some of the gil collectors find it preferable to engage in such practices as opposed to working in actual farms or factories.

MGD: Is the perception of gold-farming as abusive with sweatshop-like conditions over-represented? Can the over-representation of a victimizing narrative be harmful and possibly prevent positive social change?

UM: I think gil collectors should be the ones answering the question of whether they feel exploited or not. I do believe there is a tendency for us in the “First World” to look at an image of, say, a bunch of shirtless guys in a room somewhere in Asia and immediately think “sweatshop” and “oppression.” Which is not to say that we should overlook the ways in which this practice obviously fits into the context of global capitalism, like I said earlier. But I do believe that there is a underlying cyber-Orientalism in the tropes of Chinese Gold Farmers or (Amazon’s) Mechanical Turks. I think this Orientalism serves to conceal the fact that, as I heard Alex Galloway say recently, we are all Gold Farmers. In other words, in this age of user-generated content, we all find ourselves being (sometimes willingly) exploited by Web 2.0 companies. You might derive some benefit from poking your friends around in Facebook, but basically it’s a glorified marketing ponzi scheme where you surrender your personal data and your privacy. It’s just that we find it much easier to think of those being exploited as being Chinese. You and I, on the other hand, could never think of ourselves as being exploited by Google. But at least the folks in China are getting paid!

MGD: On your web site you talk about the paranodal and the network as a site to resist the commodification of the social — how can these ideas be applied to gold farming?

UM: The paranodal is the space between the nodes in a network. This space is not empty. It is populated by multitudes that do not quite conform to the organizing logic of the network. In essence, my concept of the paranodal is just a way to talk about the politics of inclusion and exclusion in networks. All networks exclude. For every node you have paranodes, at once attached to and detached from the network. So if we think of MMORPGs as networks, then gil collectors could indeed be an example of the paranodal, working and existing in the interstices of the network. In a recent alternate reality game I organized for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, we played with a gold farming scenario and we contemplated whether there could be Fair Trade gil, just like we have Fair Trade coffee and chocolate–in other words, a system for compensating workers appropriately. But in reality, I don’t think this would work. For one thing, the Chinese government is already getting involved in trying to prevent or limit the exchange of virtual currency for real goods and services. Secondly, my guess is that companies that produce MMORPGs, while they initially tried to ignore and then repress gold farming (by closing the accounts of farmers, for instance), will eventually adopt the sale of virtual goods as part of their business models. They will realize there is a demand and figure out a way to make money form it. What started as a paranodal practice will become mainstream, and more importantly, automated. Some companies like Sony already started doing this, with their Everquest Station Exchange. So I’m not sure gold farming as a paranodal practice has much relevance to resisting the commodification of the social. In the end, however, I am more concerned about *my* paranodal resistance. I would definitely want to work on that before prescribing what someone in China should do.

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