[T:] invitation to join new research network: unlike us!

[Karl Dietz]

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Geert Lovink <geert at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> Unlike Us: Understanding Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives
>
> Invitation to join the network (a series of events, a reader, workshops,
> online debates, campaigns etc.)
>
> Concept: Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures/HvA, Amsterdam) and
> Korinna Patelis (Cyprus University of Technology, Lemasol)
>
> Thanks to Marc Stumpel, Sabine Niederer, Vito Campanelli, Ned Rossiter,
> Michael Dieter, Oliver Leistert, Taina Bucher, Gabriella Coleman, Ulises
> Mejias, Anne Helmond, Lonneke van der Velden, Morgan Currie and Eric
> Kluitenberg for their input.
>
> Summary
> The aim of this proposal is to establish a research network of artists,
> designers, scholars, activists and programmers who work on 'alternatives in
> social media'. Through workshops, conferences, online dialogues and
> publications, Unlike Us intends to both analyze the economic and cultural
> aspects of dominant social media platforms and to propagate the further
> development and proliferation of alternative, decentralized social media
> software.
>
> If you want to join the Unlike Us network, start your own initiatives in
> this field or hook up what you have already been doing for ages, subcribe to
> the email list. Traffic will be modest. Soon there will be a special
> page/blog for the initative on the INC website. Also an independent social
> network will be installed shortly, using alternative software. More on that
> later! List
> info:http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/unlike-us_listcultures.org
>
> Background
> Whether or not we are in the midst of internet bubble 2.0, we can all agree
> that social media dominate internet and mobile use. The emergence of
> web-based user to user services, driven by an explosion of informal
> dialogues, continuous uploads and user generated content have greatly
> empowered the rise of participatory culture. At the same time, monopoly
> power, commercialization and commodification are also on the rise with just
> a handful of social media platforms dominating the social web. These two
> contradictory processes – both the facilitation of free exchanges and the
> commercial exploitation of social relationships – seem to lie at the heart
> of contemporary capitalism. On the one hand new media create and expand the
> social spaces through which we interact, play and even politicize ourselves;
> on the other hand they are literally owned by three or four companies that
> have phenomenal power to shape such interaction. Whereas the hegemonic
> Internet ideology promises open, decentralized systems, why do we, time and
> again, find ourselves locked into closed corporate environments? Why are
> individual users so easily charmed by these 'walled gardens'? Do we
> understand the long-term costs that society will pay for the ease of use and
> simple interfaces of their beloved 'free' services?
>
> The accelerated growth and scope of Facebook’s social space, for example, is
> unheard of. Facebook claims to have 700 million users, ranks in the top two
> or three first destination sites on the Web worldwide and is valued at 50
> billion US dollars. Its users willingly deposit a myriad of snippets of
> their social life and relationships on a site that invests in an accelerated
> play of sharing and exchanging information. We all befriend, rank,
> recommend, create circles, upload photos, videos and update our status. A
> myriad of (mobile) applications orchestrate this offer of private moments in
> a virtual public, seamlessly embedding the online world in users’ everyday
> life.
>
> Yet despite its massive user base, the phenomena of online social networking
> remains fragile. Just think of the fate of the majority of social networking
> sites. Who has ever heard of Friendster? The death of Myspace has been
> looming on the horizon for quite some time. The disappearance of Twitter and
> Facebook – and Google, for that matter – is only a masterpiece of software
> away. This means that the protocological future is not stationary but allows
> space for us to carve out a variety of techno-political interventions.
> Unlike Us is developed in the spirit of RSS-inventor and uberblogger Dave
> Winer whose recent Blork project is presented as an alternative for
> ‘corporate blogging silos’. But instead of repeating the
> entrepreneurial-start-up-transforming-into-corporate-behemoth formula, isn't
> it time to reinvent the internet as a truly independent public
> infrastructure that can effectively defend itself against corporate
> domination and state control?
>
> Agenda
> Going beyond the culture of complaint about our ignorance and loss of
> privacy, the proposed network of artists, scholars, activists and media
> folks will ask fundamental and overarching questions about how to tackle
> these fast-emerging monopoly powers. Situated within the existing oligopoly
> of ownership and use, this inquiry will include the support of software
> alternatives and related artistic practices and the development of a common
> alternative vision of how the techno-social world might be mediated.
>
> Without falling into the romantic trap of some harmonious offline life,
> Unlike Us asks what sort of network architectures could be designed that
> contribute to ‘the common’, understood as a shared resource and system of
> collective production that supports new forms of social organizations (such
> as organized networks) without mining for data to sell. What aesthetic
> tactics could effectively end the expropriation of subjective and private
> dimensions that we experience daily in social networks? Why do we ignore
> networks that refuse the (hyper)growth model and instead seek to strengthen
> forms of free cooperation? Turning the tables, let's code and develop other
> 'network cultures' whose protocols are no longer related to the logic of
> 'weak ties'. What type of social relations do we want to foster and discover
> in the 21st century? Imagine dense, diverse networked exchanges between
> billions of people, outside corporate and state control. Imagine discourses
> returning subjectivities to their 'natural' status as open nodes based on
> dialogue and an ethics of free exchange.
>
> To a large degree social media research is still dominated by quantitative
> and social scientific endeavors. So far the focus has been on moral panics,
> privacy and security, identity theft, self-representation from Goffman to
> Foucault and graph-based network theory that focuses on influencers and
> (news) hubs. What is curiously missing from the discourse is a rigorous
> discussion of the political economy of these social media monopolies. There
> is also a substantial research gap in understanding the power relations
> between the social and the technical in what are essentially software
> systems and platforms. With this initiative, we want to shift focus away
> from the obsession with youth and usage to the economic, political, artistic
> and technical aspects of these online platforms. What we first need to
> acknowledge is social media's double nature. Dismissing social media as
> neutral platforms with no power is as implausible as considering social
> media the bad boys of capitalism. The beauty and depth of social media is
> that they call for a new understanding of classic dichotomies such as
> commercial/political, private/public, users/producers,
> artistic/standardised, original/copy, democratising/ disempowering. Instead
> of taking these dichotomies as a point of departure, we want to scrutinise
> the social networking logic. Even if Twitter and Facebook implode overnight,
> the social networking logic of befriending, liking and ranking will further
> spread across all aspects of life.
>
> The proposed research agenda is at once a philosophical, epistemological and
> theoretical investigation of knowledge artifacts, cultural production and
> social relations and an empirical investigation of the specific phenomenon
> of monopoly social media. Methodologically we will use the lessons learned
> from theoretical research activities to inform practice-oriented research,
> and vice-versa. Unlike Us is a common initiative of the Institute of Network
> Cultures (Amsterdam University of Applied Science HvA) and the Cyprus
> University of Technology in Lemasol.
>
> An online network and a reader connected to a series of events initially in
> Amsterdam and Cyprus (early 2012) are already in planning. We would
> explicitly like to invite other partners to come on board who identify with
> the spirit of this proposal, to organize related conferences, festivals,
> workshops, temporary media labs and barcamps (where coders come together)
> with us. The reader (tentatively planned as number 8 in the Reader series
> published by the INC) will be produced mid-late 2012. The call for
> contributions to the network, the reader and the event series goes out in
> July 2011, followed by the publicity for the first events and other
> initiatives by possible new partners.
>
> Topics of Investigation
> The events, online platform, reader and other outlets may include the
> following topics inviting theoretical, empirical, practical and art-based
> contributions, though not every event or publication might deal with all
> issues. We anticipate the need for specialized workshops and barcamps.
>
> 1. Political Economy: Social Media Monopolies
> Social media culture is belied in American corporate capitalism, dominated
> by the logic of start-ups and venture capital, management buyouts, IPOs etc.
> Three to four companies literally own the Western social media landscape and
> capitalize on the content produced by millions of people around the world.
> One thing is evident about the market structure of social media: one-to-many
> is not giving way to many-to-many without first going through many-to-one.
> What power do these companies actually have? Is there any evidence that such
> ownership influences user-generated content? How does this ownership express
> itself structurally and in technical terms? What conflicts arise when a
> platform like Facebook is appropriated for public or political purposes,
> while access to the medium can easily be denied by the company? Facebook is
> worth billions, does that really mean something for the average user? How
> does data-mining work and what is its economy? What is the role of discourse
> (PR) in creating and sustaining an image of credibility and trustworthiness,
> and in which forms does it manifest to oppose that image? The bigger social
> media platforms form central nodes, such as image upload services and short
> ulr services. This ecology was once fairly open, with a variety of new
> Twitter-related services coming into being, but now Twitter takes up these
> services itself, favoring their own product through default settings; on top
> of that it is increasingly shutting down access to developers, which shrinks
> the ecology and makes it less diverse.
>
> 2. The Private in the Public
> The advent of social media has eroded privacy as we know it, giving rise to
> a culture of self-surveillance made up of myriad voluntary, everyday
> disclosures. New understandings of private and public are needed to address
> this phenomenon. What does owning all this user data actually mean? Why are
> people willing to give up their personal data, and that of others? How
> should software platforms be regulated? Is software like a movie to be given
> parental guidance? What does it mean that there are different levels of
> access to data, from partner info brokers and third-party developers to the
> users? Why is education in social media not in the curriculum of secondary
> schools? Can social media companies truly adopt a Social Network Users’ Bill
> of Rights?
>
> 3. Visiting the Belly of the Beast
> The exuberance and joy that defined the dotcom era is cliché by now. IT use
> is occurring across the board, and new labour conditions can be found
> everywhere. But this should not keep our eyes away from the power relations
> inside internet companies. What are the geopolitical lines of distribution
> that define the organization and outsourcing taking place in global IT
> companies these days? How is the industry structured and how does its
> economy work? Is there a broader connection to be made with the politics of
> land expropriation and peasant labour in countries like India, for instance,
> and how does this analytically converge with the experiences of social media
> users? How do monopolies deal with their employees’ use of the platforms?
> What can we learn from other market sectors and perspectives that
> (critically) reflect on, for example, techniques of sustainability or fair
> trade?
>
> 4. Artistic Responses to Social Media
> Artists are playing a crucial role in visualizing power relationships and
> disrupting subliminal daily routines of social media usage. Artistic
> practice provides an important analytical site in the context of the
> proposed research agenda, as artists are often first to deconstruct the
> familiar and to facilitate an alternative lens to understand and critique
> these media. Is there such a thing as a social 'web aesthetics'? It is one
> thing to criticize Twitter and Facebook for their primitive and bland
> interface designs. How can we imagine the social in different ways? And how
> can we design and implement new interfaces to provide more creative freedom
> to cater to our multiple identities? Also, what is the scope of
> interventions with social media, such as, for example, the ‘dislike button’
> add-on for Facebook? And what practices are really needed? Isn’t it time,
> for example, for a Facebook ‘identity correction’?
>
> 5. Designing culture: representation and software
> Social media offer us the virtual worlds we use every day. From Facebook's
> 'like' button to blogs’ user interface, these tools empower and delimit our
> interactions. How do we theorize the plethora of social media features? Are
> they to be understood as mere technical functions, cultural texts,
> signifiers, affordances, or all these at once? In what ways do design and
> functionalities influence the content and expressions produced? And how can
> we map and critique this influence? What are the cultural assumptions
> embedded in the design of social media sites and what type of users or
> communities do they produce? To answer the question of structure and design,
> one route is to trace the genealogy of functionalities, to historicize them
> and look for discursive silences. How can we make sense of the constant
> changes occurring both on and beyond the interface? How can we theorize the
> production and configuration of an ever-increasing algorithmic and
> protocological culture more generally?
>
> 6. Software Matters: Sociotechnical and Algorithmic Cultures
> One of the important components of social media is software. For all the
> discourse on sociopolitical power relations governed by corporations such as
> Facebook and related platforms, one must not forget that social media
> platforms are thoroughly defined and powered by software. We need critical
> engagement with Facebook as software. That is, what is the role of software
> in reconfiguring contemporary social spaces? In what ways does code make a
> difference in how identities are formed and social relationships performed?
> How does the software function to interpellate users to its logic? What are
> the discourses surrounding software? One of the core features of Facebook
> for instance is its news feed, which is algorithmically driven and sorted in
> its default mode. The EdgeRank algorithm of the news feed governs the logic
> by which content becomes visible, acting as a modern gatekeeper and
> editorial voice. Given its 700 million users, it has become imperative to
> understand the power of EdgeRank and its cultural implications. Another
> important analytical site for investigation are the ‘application programming
> interfaces’ (APIs) that to a large extent made the phenomenal growth of
> social media platforms possible in the first place. How have APIs
> contributed to the business logic of social media? How can we theorize
> social media use from the perspective of the programmer?
>
> 6. Genealogies of Social Networking Sites
> Feedback in a closed system is a core characteristic of Facebook; even the
> most basic and important features, such as 'friending', traces back to early
> cybernetics' ideas of control. While the word itself became lost in various
> transitions, the ideas of cybernetics have remained stable in fields such as
> artificial intelligence, robotics and the biopolitical arena. Both
> communication and information theories shaped this discourse. How does
> Facebook relate to such an algorithmic shape of social life? What can
> Facebook teach us about the powers of systems theory? Would Norbert Wiener
> and Niklas Luhmann be friends on Facebook?
>
> 7. Is Research Doomed?
> The design of Facebook excludes the third person perspective, as the only
> way in is through ones own profile. What does this inbuilt ‘me-centricity’
> imply for social media research? Does it require us to rethink the so-called
> objectivity of researchers and the detached view of current social research?
> Why is it that there are more than 200 papers about the way people use
> Facebook, but the site is ‘closed’ to true quantitative inquiry? Is the
> state of art in social media research exemplary of the 'quantitative turn'
> in new media research? Or is there a need to expand and rethink methods of
> inquiry in social media research? Going beyond the usual methodological
> approaches of the quantitative and qualitative, we seek to broaden the scope
> of investigating these media. How can we make sense of the political economy
> and the socio-technical elements, and with what means? Indeed, what are our
> toolkits for collective, transdisciplinary modes of knowledge and the
> politics of refusal?
>
> 8. Researching Unstable Ontologies
> Software destabilizes Facebook as a solid ontology. Software is always in
> becoming and so by nature ontogenetic. It grows and grows, living off of
> constant input. Logging on one never encounters the same content, as it
> changes on an algorithmic level and in terms of the platform itself. What
> does Facebook’s fluid nature imply for how we make sense of and study it?
> Facebook for instance willingly complicates research: 1. It is always
> personalized (see Eli Pariser). Even when creating ‘empty’ research accounts
> it never gives the same results compared to other people’s empty research
> accounts. 2. One must often be 'inside' social media to study it. Access
> from the outside is limited, which reinforces the first problem. 3. Outside
> access is ideally (for Facebook and Twitter) arranged through carefully
> regulated protocols of APIs and can easily be restricted. Next to social
> media as a problem for research, there is also the question of social
> research methods as intervention.
>
> 9. Making Sense of Data: Visualization and Critique
> Data representation is one of the most important battlefields nowadays.
> Indeed, global corporations build their visions of the world increasingly
> based on and structured around complex data flows. What is the role of data
> today and what are the appropriate ways in which to make sense of the
> burgeoning datasets? As data visualization is becoming a powerful buzzword
> and social research increasingly uses digital tools to make ‘beautiful’
> graphs and visualizations, there is a need to take a step back and question
> the usefulness of current data visualization tools and to develop novel
> analytical frameworks through which to critically grasp these often
> simplified and nontransparent ways of representing data. Not only is it
> important to develop new interpretative and visual methods to engage with
> data flows, data itself needs to be questioned. We need to ask about data’s
> ontological and epistemological nature. What is it, who is the producer, for
> whom, where is it stored? In what ways do social media companies’ terms of
> service regulate data? Whether alternative social media or monopolistic
> platforms, how are our data-bodies exactly affected by changes in the
> software?
>
> 10. Pitfalls of Building Social Media Alternatives
> It is not only important to critique and question existing design and
> socio-political realities but also to engage with possible futures. The
> central aim of this project is therefore to contribute and support
> 'alternatives in social media'. What would the collective design of
> alternative protocols and interfaces look like? We should find some comfort
> in the small explosion of alternative options currently available, but also
> ask how usable these options are and how real is the danger of
> fragmentation. How have developers from different initiatives so far
> collaborated and what might we learn from their successes and failures?
> Understanding any early failures and successes of these attempts seems
> crucial. A related issue concerns funding difficulties faced by projects.
> Finally, in what ways does regionalism (United States, Europe, Asia) feed
> into the way people search for alternatives and use social media.
>
> 11. Showcasing Alternatives in Social Media
> The best way to criticize platform monopolies is to support alternative free
> and open source software that can be locally installed. There are currently
> a multitude of decentralized social networks in the making that aspire to
> facilitate users with greater power to define for themselves with whom share
> their data. Let us look into the wildly different initiatives from
> Crabgrass, Appleseed, Diaspora, NoseRub, BuddyCloud, Protonet, StatusNet,
> GNU Social, Lorea and OneSocialWeb to the distributed Twitter alternative
> Thimbl. In which settings are these initiative developed and what choices
> are made for their design? Let's hear from the Spanish activists who have
> recently made experiences with the n-1.cc platform developed by Lorea. What
> community does this platform enable? While traditional software focuses on
> the individual profile and its relation to the network and a public (share
> with friends, share with friends of friends, share with public), the Lorea
> software for instance asks you with whom to share an update, picture or
> video. It finegrains the idea of privacy and sharing settings at the content
> level, not the user’s profile. At the same time, it requires constant
> decision making, or else a high level of trust in the community you share
> your data with. And how do we experience the transition from, or
> interoperability with, other platforms? Is it useful to make a distinction
> between corporate competitors and grassroots initiatives? How can these beta
> alternatives best be supported, both economically and socially? Aren't we
> overstating the importance of software and isn't the availability of capital
> much bigger in determining the adoption of a platform?
>
> 12. Social Media Activism and the Critique of Liberation Technology
> While the tendency to label any emergent social movement as the latest
> 'Twitter revolution' has passed, a liberal discourse of 'liberation
> technology' (information and communication technologies that empower
> grassroots movements) continues to influence our ideas about networked
> participation. This discourse tends to obscure power relations and obstruct
> critical questioning about the capitalist institutions and superstructures
> in which these technologies operate. What are the assumptions behind this
> neo-liberal discourse? What role do ‘developed’ nations play when they
> promote and subsidize the development of technologies of circumvention and
> hacktivism for use in ‘underdeveloped’ states, while at the same time
> allowing social media companies at home to operate in increasingly
> deregulated environments and collaborating with them in the surveillance of
> citizens at home and abroad? What role do companies play in determining how
> their products are used by dissidents or governments abroad? How have their
> policies and Terms of Use changed as a result?
>
> 13. Social Media in the Middle East and Beyond
> The justified response to downplay the role of Facebook in early 2011 events
> in Tunisia and Egypt by putting social media in a larger perspective has not
> taken off the table the question of how to organize social mobilizations.
> Which specific software do the 'movements of squares' need? What happens to
> social movements when the internet and ICT networks are shut down? How does
> the interruption of internet services shift the nature of activism? How have
> repressive and democratic governments responded to the use of ‘liberation
> technologies’? How do these technologies change the relationship between the
> state and its citizens? How are governments using the same social media
> tools for surveillance and propaganda or highjacking Facebook identities,
> such as happened in Syria? What is Facebook’s own policy when deleting or
> censoring accounts of its users? How can technical infrastructures be
> supported which are not shutdown upon request? How much does our agency
> depend on communication technology nowadays? And whom do we exclude with
> every click? How can we envision 'organized networks' that are based on
> 'strong ties' yet open enough to grow quickly if the time is right? Which
> software platforms are best suited for the 'tactical camping' movements that
> occupy squares all over the world?
>
> 14. Data storage: social media and legal cultures
> Data that is voluntarily shared by social media users is not only used for
> commercial purposes, but is also of interest to governments. This data is
> stored on servers of companies that are bound to the specific legal culture
> and country. This material-legal complex is often overlooked. Fore instance,
> the servers of Facebook and Twitter are located in the US and therefore fall
> under the US jurisdiction. One famous example is the request for the Twitter
> accounts of several activists (Gonggrijp, Jónsdóttir, Applebaum) affiliated
> with Wikileaks projects by the US government. How do activists respond and
> how do alternative social media platforms deal with this issue?
>
> Contact details:
>
> Geert Lovink (geert at xs4all.nl)
> Korinna Patelis (korinna.patelis at cut.ac.cy / kpatelis at yahoo.com)
>
> Institute of Network Cultures
> CREATE-IT/Hogeschool van Amsterdam
> www.networkcultures.org