Journal articles: 'Actually Existing Utopias' – Grafiati (2024)

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

This essay, following an existing train of scholarship working to make sense of the Platonic connection to Utopia, argues for nomos as a useful angle in furthering this understanding. Raphael's approach to politics combines with the Utopian social system to suggest a highly Platonic vision of nomos, whereby social norms are absorbed into an essentialized nature, stripped of all arbitrariness and therefore, ostensibly, perfectly rational. The result is a sterile regime that fails to acknowledge the whimsical elements necessary to the human soul and therefore also necessary to actual human societies.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

In the preface to this passionately argued text, the author makes the political aspects of the work quite clear. She states that she hopes readers will “become angry, desperate, frustrated, as well as reflective, optimistic and eager to join me and others in demanding, suggesting, creating, and implementing change” (p. xv). This statement sets the tone for the entire book: a mixture of self-professed utopian thinking (p. 600) and clear-sighted accounts of actually existing conditions. Recognizing that a simple call for justice is not enough in a world dominated by transnational capitalism and marked by institutionalized inequities in power, the author admits that a human rights approach to linguistic issues will only work if there is also a redistribution of the world's resources. The book is thus a call to action on a variety of fronts.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The critical theory of the Frankfurt School starts with an explanatory-diagnostic analysis of the social pathologies of the present followed by anticipatory-utopian reflection on possible treatments for these disorders. This approach draws extensively on parallels to medicine. I argue that the ideas of social pathology and crisis that pervade the methodological writings of the Frankfurt School help to explain critical theory’s contention that the object of critique identifies itself when social institutions cease to function smoothly. However, in reflecting on the role that reason and self-awareness play in the second stage of social criticism, I contend that this model is actually better conceptualized through the lens of the psychoanalyst rather than the physician. Although the first generation’s explicit commitment to psychoanalysis has dissipated in recent critical theory, faith in a rationalized ‘talking cure’ leading to greater self-awareness of existing pathologies remains at the core of the Frankfurt School.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The globalisation of mankind as a moral and ethical justification for the installation of a worldwide domestication policy distracts the attention of leading Eurasian politicians from the actual fundamentals and detrimental threats of globalisation in the Eurasian space, especially if economic issues, investment programmes and lending are put in the foreground. These topics can relate to only short-term necessary regulation and control interventions without strategic perspectives of development of Eurasia. Such a narrow understanding of the situation creates a myth that the global expansion of the Western “value system” can continue in Eurasia indefinitely. This basic assumption of the modern "Enlightened" politics of Europeanisation of Eurasia is not just a utopia, a non-existent place like the ancient Greeks thought. It may create a dystopia, the worst place in the world. Will we live in such Eurasia like this?

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

On the basis of the analysis of existing theories about the origin and historical genesis of modern nationalism the conceptual approach is proposed, according to which the process of nation formation is one of the important dimensions of the world historical process. The author reveals the complex interdependance and mutual opposition of specific historical types of national identity as well as the importance of a new national patriotism for formation of the universal innovative model of anti-crisis development and mechanisms of its implementation in Ukraine. In particular, the author refutes mystical and mythological projects of the crisis-free future as well as only outwardly opposing them, globalist anti-utopian projects (the model of so-called network society of M. Castells). The article proves the actuality of real national revival against a background of the naturally determined collapse of the neoliberal globalist trend and continuation of fragmentation of global geopolitical space. It is shown that the formation of new forms of national identity is inseparably linked with the formation of humanistic secularized world outlook during the Modern Ages and currently is the basis of the creative type of thinking.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Exploring Quicksand. Translation Criticism and Literary Criticism in the Face of the Petrification of Contemporary World Literature In contemporary discussions on the condition and further perspectives of World Literature, the mood of disappointment and disillusionment seems to dominate. Reservations concern World Literature in its complexity – its canon, potential multilingualism, existing hierarchies and often contradictory conceptualizations. The crisis of World Literature is not, however, the result of a scandal, but rather of many years of progressive petrification resulting in actual monolingualism, formulaic narrative patterns, consolidation of the center-periphery hierarchy and abandonment of the real pluralism of interpretation. One of the areas that seems to meet the challenge of World Literature is undoubtedly translation criticism. Therefore, the aim of the article is to reflect on how contemporary theories and conceptualizations of World Literature as well as its far-fetched utopia can benefit from translation criticism’s input. The article also argues that translation criticism may become a field that dynamizes contemporary World Literature and restores its reordering or even revolutionary potential.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The cooperation between the Catholic Church and the State is a necessity and an imperative that was addressed by two important thinkers of the 19th century, John Henry Newman and Josip Juraj Strossmayer, and the models that actually trace back to their reflections are existent even nowadays. In the second part of a textological and theological analysis of Newman’s and Strossmayer’s understanding of the relationship between the Church and the State, our objective is to explore how much Newman’s and Strossmayer’s deliberations may be useful in the formulation of the bases on which a good relationship between the Catholic Church and the State should be built. We have seen that comprehension and concord are the fundamental imperatives of that relationship, as well as of the contemporary models that analyze it. The modern obstacles to this relationship have the identical roots, findable in negative liberalism and repaganization. On the trail of Newman and Strossmayer, we conclude that an anthropological reform primarily taking hold of the human heart is necessary today. Therefore, such a reform has to realize that the life in accordance with one’s own conscience, in the truth, is more valuable than all the utopian lies and deceptions that formulate the socioeconomic relations and personal life.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The article analyzes the political discourse of one of the most influential Ugandan opposition politicians, Bobi Wine, who is famous for his scathing criticism of Ioweri Museveni’s regime, existing since 1986. Bobi Wine, who officially started his political career in 2017, the year when he was elected in the Ugandan parliament, actually does not recognize the legitimacy of the rule of his ideological enemy. In the country the political myth is created according to which the opposition, and not Yoweri Musevini, won the presidential elections of 2021. Yoweri Museveni just used mass rigging of votes to ensure his victory. The research is carried out on the basis of interviews given by the oppositional politician in the years of 2017–2021. Its urgency is explained by the necessity to study non-systemic political discourse, including the one that belongs to poor, developing countries living not in democracy but in the conditions of harsh authoritarianism. The main method of the research is critical discourse analysis developed mainly by T. van Dejk, N. Fairclough, R. Wodak and based on the fundamental neo-Marxist and Foucauldian principles. It has been found out that the Ugandan oppositional political discourse is characterized by the accentuation of such oppositions as ‘the young generation vs. the older generation’, ‘people – authorities’. It is also marked by some degree of pathos, the belief in utopian visions and political myths as well as figurativeness. Bobi Wine emphasizes that he represents the Ugandan ghetto and, unlike his rival, he is young. Hence, he can understand the hopes of most Ugandan people who are tired of the many-years rule of the permanent leader of Uganda as well as the corruption flourishing in Uganda. In the speeches of the politician, the need for changes is explained. The stress is made on the fact that opposition does not have fear of the future while Yoweri Musevini, on the contrary, is portrayed as a person who has lost the sense of reality, and is, most of all, afraid of losing power.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The intellectually and politically tempestuous crystallization of the civic ideal in the nineteenth and twentieth century manifested not only in Europe (especially Western), but also in North and Middle America, and in time – all over the globe. An intense search for the “civic ideal” is clearly discernible in societies comprising the former Polish Republic, whose demise towards the end of the eighteenth century and the subsequent phases of its increasingdecompositionnot only failed to annihilate the republican tradition but in fact intensified authentic debate on possible roads toward modern society in the future independent state. A key role in this important dialogue was played by representatives of the landed gentry and the intelligentsia, the latter emerging in the nineteenth century as a new social formation that basically had no exact counterpart in other countries. In time, a few representatives of other classes also joined this dialogue on the shape of the future Polish state. What is the meaning of the phrase “civic society”? Today, it is used almost naturallyby columnists and politicians representing various positions, but it was virtually non-existent during Norwid’s lifetime, although the very ideaof organizing collective life on the basis of “civic” virtues has an almost immemorial provenance. This article attempts to describe Norwid’s civic thought, mainly by analysing his discursive statements, chiefly in journalism. Norwid was decidedly opposed to any doctrinaire elevation of “humanity” (which he called a “holy abstraction”) over “nation” and “Church,” through which individuals can actually partake in “the work of ages.” Another area in which Norwid struggled to develop clear civic categories comprises visions of humanity’s universal happiness and/or its apocalyptic fall, many of which were promulgated at the time. In his polemics with utopias of “fulfilled history” it is possible to discern clear echoes of ideological debates held at the time, especially ones between mystical and political visions used by various “prophets” to describe the ultimate perspectives for the development of current events whose subject is “humanity” – a category replacing “nations,” which would be thus seen as ending their historical “mission.”From this angle, Norwidwould criticise Skład zasad[A collection of principles] by Adam Mickiewicz– a manifesto of revolutionary transformations of civic rights, which are part of the legacy of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.In a letter to Józef Bohdan Zaleski, dated 24 April 1848, Norwid expressed his outrage at most theses contained in Skład, which he saw as undermining traditional values such as “homeland,” “property,” “lineage,” “nation,” etc.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Статья предлагает обратиться к методологическим основаниям социально-философской футурологии в критическом ключе. Автор указывает, что способы философского мышления о будущем не только распространились в современной культуре, но и колонизировали социальную и культурную теорию. Одержимость футурологией стала ответом на нарастание скорости изменений в обществе и фрагментацию больших нарративов. Социально-философская футурология заняла место философии истории и составила конкуренцию утопическому измерению классических идеологий. В конечном итоге апелляция к будущему становится де факто составной частью любого осмысленного рассуждения о настоящем, всегда подразумеваемым продолжением анализа научных данных. Автор предлагает очертить методологические границы дисциплины, которые бы разграничили еѐ с другими научными и культурными предметностями, тенденция к растворению в которых стала проблемой не только для философии, но и для самих частных наук (экономики, социологии и т. д.). Статья показывает, что в основе строгой социальнофилософской футурологии должны лежать уникальные методы, порождѐнные философской традицией: логический анализ, мысленный эксперимент, перформативная критика риторики, а также оценка этического измерения происходящего. Главными опасностями для дисциплины становятся, с одной стороны, соблазны вольного обращения с эмпирическими данными, а с другой стороны, производство фантастических нарративов. Автор уточняет способы функционирования социальнофилософской футурологии в контексте современной культурной логики капитализма и указывает на наиболее продуктивную для дисциплины стратегию работы с будущим. Ей становится социально-философский анализ логики существующей капиталистической системы. The article makes an attempt to critically analyze the methodological basis of social-philosophical futurology. The author argues that the ways of philosophical thinking about the future became common not only in contemporary culture but also colonized social and cultural theories. The futurology obsession was an answer to the growth of the speed of changes and the fragmentation of the grand narratives. Social-philosophical futurology replaced philosophy of history and competed with utopia dimension of classical ideologies. Eventually the appellation to the future de facto becomes a part of thinking about the present, the always-present continuation of the scientific data analysis. The author proposes to find the limits of its methodological borders, that would distinguish it from other scientific and cultural spheres, in which it tends to dissolve. The latter became not just a problem for philosophy but also for concrete disciplines (economics, sociology etc.). The article shows that in the basis of social-philosophical futurology have to exist unique methods born inside philosophical tradition: logical analysis, thought experiment, performative critique of rhetoric and ethical (value) evaluation of the present. The main risks are, however, temptations to treat empirical data freely and to produce fantastic narratives. Among other things the author specifies the ways of social-philosophical functioning in the borders of contemporary cultural logic of capitalism and points out the most effective strategy to deal with it. The latter is understood as social-philosophical analysis of actually existing capitalist system.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

This article is focused on exploring the value of literary utopias for social theory. The literary utopia, at first glance, appears irrelevant to sociology, its imaginative descriptions of social worlds both radically different and substantively better than our own seeming to skip over the central task of sociological enquiry: the diagnosis of society as it exists. In this article, the author aims to demonstrate that this is mistaken: the tradition of literary utopianising has much to contribute to sociology. Utopian authors, from Thomas More in the sixteenth century to Ursula K Le Guin in the twentieth, have developed a sophisticated and original mode of social critique. The utopian text, in bricolating and remixing aspects of actually existing society, creates something both new and astonishing. In looking laterally at the world from the perspective of utopia, consciousness of the contradictions and repressions of the dominant relations in contemporary society is sharpened. The literary utopia achieves this in two ways: first, it demonstrates how the not yet realised norms of the author’s society can be fulfilled and, second, it discloses the hidden possibilities for new ways of living that are present but denied in the social world.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

The survival of the global capitalist order depends upon its ability to convince people who are disempowered and dispossessed by this system that there is no alternative. Thus, utopias are defined as impossible and nonexistent. Yet Erik Olin Wright’s Real Utopias project upends this dominant logic and highlights actually existing alternatives to capitalism that have been essential to the very survival of many. The deepening global financial crisis heightens the urgency that these real utopias become more widely known and practiced.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Computer-brain analogies are ubiquitous in contemporary culture. They also have a long and relevant history. Throughout the history of computer development, computers as “brain-mimicking machines” were used as blueprints for computer design, as inspiration for new visionary ideas, as tools of liberation and as ideological construct obscuring actually existing power relations. Today, with the growing disenchantment with the results of digital transformation, we are forced to admit that these analogies often underpin relationships between human and technology that are disempowering and increasingly problematic. Keywords: human-machine symbiosis, augmented reality, memex, hypertext, ideology, Web 2.0, platform capitalism

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Postmodernity, as is its wont, conjures up new ways of thinking about everything, and it is no different with ideas about space. One such analysis is the idea of 'heterotopias'. Published in the French journal Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité under the title 'Des Espaces Autres', and subsequently published in English as 'Of Other Spaces' in 1986 was an essay written by Michel Foucault in the mid-sixties (see Soja). In it, he coined the notion of heterotopias -- 'absolutely Other and differentiated social Spaces'. The ideas he presented formed the basis of contemporary writings on the nature of space -- with many authors using it as a way into examining 'postmodern spacings'. Given that the Internet may be the archetypical postmodern space, how useful then is the idea of heterotopias in considering cyberspace? In his essay, Foucault contrasted his notion of Utopias -- idealised conceptions of society, impossible to locate in reality -- with the idea of heterotopias. These, he suggested, were Other spaces; socially constructed counter-sites: There also exist, and this is probably true for all cultures and all civilisations, real and effective spaces which are outlined in the very institution of society, but which constitute a sort of counter-arrangement, of effectively realised utopia, in which all the real arrangements, all the other real arrangements that can be found within society, are at one and the same time represented, challenged and overturned: a sort of place that lies outside all places and yet is actually localizable. (Foucault 351) Foucault went on to present examples of heterotopias, and a set of principles which govern their existence; a kind of heterotopology. He suggested that every human culture is made up of heterotopias and in their description persists implicit social, moral and political oppositions such as private/public or pleasure/work. He initially generalised two types of heterotopia. There are heterotopias of crisis, such as the boarding school or military service, where young men were banished to experience their initial adolescent sexuality. And heterotopias of deviance, such as rest homes, clinics and prisons where those considered abnormal could be spatially isolated. Foucault also suggested that society can reshape existing heterotopias, so that they function in very different ways. The cemetery, for example, has changed from being a place of little importance, to one that is revered -- as western atheism has placed more emphasis on the dead body in contrast to older religious societies, whose understanding encompassed ideas of resurrection, and de-emphasised the physical container. Similarly, a heterotopia can juxtapose several contradictory spaces in a single real place. Such a place is the cinema, where many social spaces exist in the one physical location -- the two-dimensional screen projecting a three-dimensional space for the pleasure of a real life audience. Of course, heterotopias have a relationship to time. Places like museums and fairs can be defined by their respective biases towards chronology. A museum leans towards the eternal, a fair towards the transitory. As well, heterotopias contain within their spaces a system of opening and closing that isolates them -- and excludes those without the necessary permission to enter. Or only accepts those who have been forced into its confines. Finally, heterotopias have a function which places them between opposite poles. They create "a space of illusion that reveals how all of space is more illusory". And they form a space of compensation -- one that contrasts the utopias that otherwise exist. To Foucault then, heterotopias are conceived as socially defined spaces that embrace material and immaterial, and yet are located outside of all other places -- even though it may be possible to indicate their position 'in reality'. Indeed, his most concrete example may in fact be that of the boat, a floating space searching for new colonies -- themselves imagined heterotopias that represent most clearly the Other. With that example in mind, we can briefly explore the idea of framing the Internet as a heterotopic space. If we take as a given that the new communications and computing technologies have resulted in the formation of new social spaces, it is a relatively straightforward task to map this so-called cyberspace as a heterotopia. Some, such as McKenzie Wark, have done just that. Without holding cyberspace up to each heterotopic principle in detail, it is apparent that, at first blush, cyberspace contradicts none of the previously described Foucauldian principles. Cyberspace handily embraces notions of the other, limits access and presents contradictions of purpose, illusion, the imagination and deviancy. The romantic ideal of cyberspace as the Other World, conjured up in countless science fiction novels and articles in the popular press seems to confirm its heterotopic status. On closer inspection though, some (none too) subtleties emerge. Initially, cyberspace should not be thought of as a single space. Whilst the network is a kind of malleable, expandable, linked unity, the actual social spaces that result from its amorphous being are many in number and vary in both quantity and quality. The early cyberspatial constructs range from sex-based chat-rooms to commodified digital libraries and embrace almost every spatial possibility in between. Thus, not only can cyberspace as a whole be considered a heterotopia, but within cyberspace itself there must exist heterotopias -- and indeed utopias. Within this larger 'other' space, there must be a mosaic of normality and deviance, imagined and real, juxtaposed and otherwise, that reflects the social relations emerging in cyberspace. Within the colony of the Internet, there is an emerging complexity still to be explored. More widely though, the very idea of heterotopias suggests a problem with the definition of 'other'. Foucault's initial contrast between utopia and heterotopia was not particularly detailed and provided few clues as to how to locate the essence of difference. Whilst it is tempting to use the term 'heterotopia' as a catchcry for new conceptions of spatialisation, as a kind of postmodern reframing of space embracing generic notions of 'Other', it is perhaps a simplistic approach that produces little. As Benjamin Genocchio points out, "scouring the absolute limits of imagination, the question then becomes: what cannot be designated a heterotopia? It follows that the bulk of these uncritical applications of the term as a discontinuous space of impartial/resistant use must be viewed as problematic" (40). Or in this context, bluntly, what can be gained from suggesting that cyberspace is a heterotopia -- or even a heterotopic set? The key lies perhaps in Foucault's final principle of heterotopia: Finally, the last characteristic of heterotopias is that they have, in relation to the rest of space, a function that takes place between two opposite poles. On the one hand they perform the task of creating a space of illusion that reveals how all of space is more illusory, all the locations within which life is fragmented. On the other, they have the function of forming another space, another real space, as perfect, meticulous and well-arranged as ours is disordered, ill-conceived and in a sketchy state. This heterotopia is not one of illusion but of compensation, and I wonder if it is not somewhat in this manner that certain colonies have functioned. (Foucault 356) The suggestion here is that a heterotopian framing for an observation of cyberspace can be valuable. For example, the character of cyberspace -- the different social and individual constructs that are becoming visible in the so-called virtual communities -- forces us to reflect upon the other spaces that exist in our societies. The nature of the new spaces gives us overt clues as to the construction of our existing societies. Further, cyberspace is a new space -- a compensatory space, which exists in contrast to that initial reflective realm. Moreover, this particular new space has characteristics that allow it new freedoms of construction. Its lack of material constraints give rise to new ideas about risk, consequence and relationship. The ease with which rules (expressed entirely in malleable software schemes) can be changed alters ideas of existing social mores. And there are myriad possibilities, both intended and accidental, which will unfold as the power of the new technologies becomes apparent. It is early days yet. If the history of the Internet is paralleled to that of the motorcar, we live in an era just before Henry Ford introduced the Model T. As the story of cyberspace unfolds, new spatial conceptions -- new heterotopias -- will emerge that give rise to different social possibilities. Perhaps this is the point of heterotopias. Not that they exist as a way of categorising, but that as a way of examining social spaces, they give rise to new discourses about what those spaces are, how they arise and what they may mean. New discourses about knowledge, power and society. Which ultimately are reflected in the constitution of our human relationships. Just as the colonisation of the new world eventually shattered established western social conventions and changed the shape of the western world, the settlement of cyberspace may do the same. References Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias." Rethinking Architecture. Ed. Edmund Leach. London: Routledge, 1997. Genocchio, Benjamin. "Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: The Question of 'Other' Spaces." Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Eds. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995. Soja, Edward. "Heterotopologies: A Remembrance of Other Spaces in the Citadel-LA." Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Eds. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sherman Young. "Of Cyber Spaces: The Internet & Heterotopias." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.4 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/hetero.php>. Chicago style: Sherman Young, "Of Cyber Spaces: The Internet & Heterotopias," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 4 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/hetero.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Sherman Young. (1998) Of cyber spaces: the Internet & heterotopias. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/hetero.php> ([your date of access]).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction Utopia has always been countercultural, and ever since technological progress has allowed, utopia has been using alternative media to promote and strengthen its underpinning ideals. In this article, I am seeking to clarify the connections between counterculture and alternative media in utopian contexts to demonstrate their reciprocity, then draw together these threads through reference to a well-known figure of the Rainbow Region–Rusty Miller. His trajectory from iconic surfer and Aquarian reporter to mediator for utopian politics and ideals in the Rainbow Region encompasses in a single identity the three elements underpinning this study. In concluding, I will turn to Rusty’s Byron Guide, questioning its classification as alternative or mainstream media, and whether Byron Bay is represented as countercultural and utopian in this long-running and ongoing publication. Counterculture and Alternative Media in Utopian Contexts Counterculture is an umbrella that enfolds utopia, among many other genres and practices. It has been most often situated in the 1960s and 1970s as a new form of social movement embodying youth resistance to the technocratic mainstream and its norms of gender, sexuality, politics, music, and language (Roszak). Many scholars of counterculture underscore its utopian impulses both in the projection of better societies where the social goals are achieved, and in the withdrawal from mainstream society into intentional communities (Yinger 194-6; McKay 5; Berger). Before exploring further the connections between counterculture and alternative media, I want to define the scope of countercultural utopian contexts in general, and the Rainbow Region in particular. Utopia is a neologism created by Sir Thomas More almost 500 years ago to designate the island community that demonstrates order, harmony, justice, hope and desire in the right balance so that it seems like an ideal land. This imaginary place described in Utopia (1516) as a counterpoint to the social, political and religious shortcomings of contemporary 16th century British society, has attracted accusations of heresy (Molner), and been used as a pejorative term, an insult to denigrate political projects that seem farfetched or subversive, especially during the 19th century. Almost every study of utopian theory, literature and practice points to a dissatisfaction with the status quo, which inspires writers, politicians, architects, artists, individuals and communities to rail against it (see for example Davis, Moylan, Suvin, Levitas, Jameson). Kingsley Widmer’s book Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts reiterates what many scholars have stated when he writes that utopias should be understood in terms of what they are countering. Lyman Tower Sargent defines utopia as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space” and utopianism as “social dreaming” (9), to which I would add that both indicate an improvement on the alternatives, and may indeed be striving to represent the best place imaginable. Utopian contexts, by extension, are those situations where the “social dreaming” is enhanced through human agency, good governance, just laws, education, and work, rather than being a divinely ordained state of nature (Schaer et al). In this way, utopian contexts are explicitly countercultural through their very conception, as human agency is required and their emphasis is on social change. These modes of resistance against dominant paradigms are most evident in attempts to realise textual projections of a better society in countercultural communal experiments. Almost immediately after its publication, More’s Utopia became the model for Bishop Vasco de Quiroga’s communitarian hospital-town Santa Fe de la Laguna in Michoacan, Mexico, established in the 1530s as a counterculture to the oppressive enslavement and massacres of the Purhépecha people by Nuno Guzmán (Green). The countercultural thrust of the 1960s and 1970s provided many utopian contexts, perhaps most readily identifiable as the intentional communities that spawned and flourished, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand (Metcalf, Shared Lives). They were often inspired by texts such as Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America (1970) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), and this convergence of textual practices and alternative lifestyles can be seen in the development of Australia’s own Rainbow Region. Located in northern New South Wales, the geographical area of the Northern Rivers that has come to be known as the Rainbow Region encompasses Byron Bay, Nimbin, Mullumbimby, Bangalow, Clunes, Dunoon, Federal, with Lismore as the region’s largest town. But more evocative than these place names are the “rivers and creeks, vivid green hills, fruit and nut farms […] bounded by subtropical beaches and rainforest mountains” (Wilson 1). Utopian by nature, and recognised as such by the indigenous Bundjalung people who inhabited it before the white settlers, whalers and dairy farmers moved in, the Rainbow Region became utopian through culture–or indeed counterculture–during the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin when the hippies of Mullumbimby and the surfers of Byron Bay were joined by up to 10,000 people seeking alternative ways of being in the world. When the party was over, many Aquarians stayed on to form intentional communities in the beautiful region, like Tuntable Falls, Nimbin’s first and largest such cooperative (Metcalf, From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality 74-83). In utopian contexts, from the Renaissance to the 1970s and beyond, counterculture has underpinned and alternative media has circulated the aims and ideals of the communities of resistance. The early utopian context of the Anabaptist movement has been dubbed as countercultural by Sigrun Haude: “During the reign of the Münster (1534-5) Anabaptists erected not only a religious but also a social and political counterculture to the existing order” (240). And it was this Protestant Reformation that John Downing calls the first real media war, with conflicting movements using pamphlets produced on the new technology of the Gutenberg press to disseminate their ideas (144). What is striking here is the confluence of ideas and practices at this time–countercultural ideals are articulated, published, and disseminated, printing presses make this possible, and utopian activists realise how mass media can be used and abused, exploited and censored. Twentieth century countercultural movements drew on the lessons learnt from historical uprising and revolutions, understanding the importance of getting the word out through their own forms of media which, given the subversive nature of the messages, were essentially alternative, according to the criteria proposed by Chris Atton: alternative media may be understood as a radical challenge to the professionalized and institutionalized practices of the mainstream media. Alternative media privileges a journalism that is closely wedded to notions of social responsibility, replacing an ideology of “objectivity” with overt advocacy and oppositional practices. Its practices emphasize first person, eyewitness accounts by participants; a reworking of the populist approaches of tabloid newspapers to recover a “radical popular” style of reporting; collective and antihierarchical forms of organization which eschew demarcation and specialization–and which importantly suggest an inclusive, radical form of civic journalism. (267) Nick Couldry goes further to point out the utopian processes required to identify agencies of change, including alternative media, which he defines as “practices of symbolic production which contest (in some way) media power itself–that is, the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions” (25). Alternative media’s orientation towards oppositional and contestatory practices demonstrates clear parallels between its ambitions and those of counterculture in utopian contexts. From the 1960s onwards, the upsurge in alternative newspaper numbers is commensurate with the blossoming of the counterculture and increased utopian contexts; Susan Forde describes it thus: “a huge resurgence in the popularity of publications throughout the ‘counter-culture’ days of the 1960s and 1970s” (“Monitoring the Establishment”, 114). The nexus of counterculture and alternative media in such utopian contexts is documented in texts like Roger Streitmatter’s Voices of Revolution and Bob Osterlag’s People’s Movements, People’s Press. Like the utopian newspapers that came out of 18th and 19th century intentional communities, many of the new alternative press served to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the countercultural movements, often focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events (see also Frobert). The radical press in Australia was also gaining ground, with OZ in Australia from 1963-1969, and then from 1967-1973 in London. Magazines launched by Philip Frazer like The Digger, Go-Set, Revolution and High Times, and university student newspapers were the main avenues for youth and alternative expression on the Vietnam war and conscription, gay and lesbian rights, racism, feminism and ecological activism (Forde, Challenging the News; co*ck & Perry). Nimbin 1973: Rusty Miller and The Byron Express The 1973 Aquarius Festival of counterculture in Nimbin (12-23 May) was a utopian context that had an alternative media life of its own before it arrived in the Rainbow Region–in student publications like Tharnuka and newsletters distributed via the Aquarius Foundation. There were other voices that announced the coming of the Aquarius Festival to Nimbin and reported on its impact, like The Digger from Melbourne and the local paper, The Northern Star. During the Festival, the Nimbin Good Times first appeared as the daily bulletin and continues today with the original masthead drawn by the Festival’s co-organiser, Graeme Dunstan. Some interesting work has been done on this area, ranging from general studies of the Rainbow Region (Wilson; Munro-Clark) to articles analysing its alternative press (Ward & van Vuuren; Martin & Ellis), but to date, there has been no focus on the Rainbow Region’s first alternative newspaper, The Byron Express. Co-edited by Rusty Miller and David Guthrie, this paper presented and mediated the aims and desires of the Aquarian movement. Though short-lived, as only 7 issues were published from 15 February 1973 to September 1973, The Byron Express left a permanent printed vestige of the Aquarian counterculture movement’s activism and ideals from an independent regional perspective. Miller’s credentials for starting up the newspaper are clear–he has always been a trailblazer, mixing “smarts” with surfing and environmental politics. After graduating from a Bachelor of Arts in history from San Diego State College, he first set foot in Byron Bay during his two semesters with the inaugural Chapman College affiliated University of the Seven Seas in 1965-6. Returning to his hometown of Encinitas, he co-founded the Surf Research accessory company with legendary Californian surfer Mike Doyle, and launched Waxmate, the first specially formulated surf wax in 1967 (Davis, Witzig & James; Warshaw 217), selling his interest in the business soon after to spend a couple of years “living the counterculture life on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai” (Davis, Witzig & James), before heading back to Byron Bay via Bells Beach in 1970 (Miller & Shantz) and Sydney, where he worked as an advertising salesman and writer with Tracks surfing magazine (Martin & Ellis). In 1971, he was one of the first to ride the now famous waves of Uluwatu in Bali, and is captured with Steven Cooney in the iconic publicity image for Albe Falzon’s 1971 film, Morning Of The Earth. The champion surfer from the US knew a thing or two about counterculture, alternative media, advertising and business when he found his new utopian context in Byron Bay. Miller and Guthrie’s front-page editorial of the inaugural issue of The Byron Express, published on 15 February 1973, with the byline “for a higher shire”, expressed the countercultural (cl)aims of the publication. Land use, property development and the lack of concern that some people in Byron had for their impact on the environment and people of the region were a prime target: With this first issue of the Byron Express, we hope to explain that the area is badly in need of a focal point. The transitions of present are vast and moving fast. The land is being sold and resold. Lots of money is coming into the area in the way of developments […] caravan parts, hotels, businesses and real estate. Many of the trips incoming are not exactly “concerned” as to what long term effect such developments might have on the environment and its people. We hope to serve as a focus of concern and service, a centre for expression and reflection. We would ask your contributions in vocal and written form. We are ready for some sock it to ya criticism… and hope you would grab us upon the street to tell us how you feel…The mission of this alternative newspaper is thereby defined by the need for a “focal point” that inscribes the voices of the community in a freely accessible narrative, recorded in print for posterity. Although this first issue contains no mention of the Aquarius Festival, there were already rumours circulating about it, as organisers Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen had been up to Main Arm, Mullumbimby and Nimbin on reconnaissance missions beginning in September 1972. Instead, there was an article on “Mullumbimby Man–Close to the Land” by Nicholas Shand, who would go on to found the community-based weekly newspaper The Echo in 1986, then called The Brunswick Valley Echo and still going strong. Another by Bob McTavish asked whether there could be a better form of government; there was a surf story, and a soul food section with a recipe for honey meade entitled “Do you want to get out of it on 10 cents a bottle?” The second issue continues in much the same vein. It is not until the third issue comes out on 17 March 1973 that the Aquarius Festival is mentioned in a skinny half column on page four. And it’s not particularly promising: Arrived at Nimbin, sleepy hamlet… Office in disused R.S.L. rooms, met a couple of guys recently arrived, said nothing was being done. “Only women here, you know–no drive”. Met Joanne and Vi, both unable to say anything to be reported… Graham Dunstan (codenamed Superfest) and John Allen nowhere in sight. Allen off on trip overseas. Dunstan due back in a couple of weeks. 10 weeks to go till “they” all come… and to what… nobody is quite sure. This progress report provides a fascinating contemporary insight into the tensions–between the local surfies and hippies on one hand, and the incoming students on the other–around the organisation of the Aquarius Festival. There is an unbridled barb at the sexist comments made by the guys, implicit criticism of the absent organisers, obvious skepticism about whether anyone will actually come to the festival, and wonderment at what it will be like. Reading between the lines, we might find a feeling of resentment about not being privy to new developments in their own backyard. The final lines of the article are non-committal “Anyway, let’s see what eventuates when the Chiefs return.” It seems that all has been resolved by the fifth issue of 11 May, which is almost entirely dedicated to the Aquarius Festival with the front page headline “Welcome to the New Age”. But there is still an undertone of slight suspicion at what the newcomers to the area might mean in terms of property development: The goal is improving your fellow man’s mind and nourishment in concert with your own; competition to improve your day and the quality of the day for society. Meanwhile, what is the first thing one thinks about when he enters Byron and the area? The physical environment is so magnificent and all encompassing that it can actually hold a man’s breath back a few seconds. Then a man says, “Wow, this land is so beautiful that one could make a quid here.” And from that moment the natural aura and spells are broken and the mind lapses into speculative equations, sales projections and future interest payments. There is plenty of “love” though, in this article: “The gathering at Nimbin is the most spectacular demonstration of the faith people have in a belief that is possible (and possible just because they want it to be) to live in love, through love together.” The following article signed by Rusty Miller “A Town Together” is equally focused on love: “See what you could offer the spirit at Nimbin. It might introduce you to a style that could lead to LOVE.” The centre spread features photos: the obligatory nudes, tents, and back to nature activities, like planting and woodworking. With a text box of “random comments” including one from a Lismore executive: ‘I took my wife and kids out there last weekend and we had such a good time. Seems pretty organized and the town was loaded with love. Heard there is some hepatitis about and rumours of VD. Everyone happy.” And another from a land speculator (surely the prime target of Miller’s wrath): “Saw guys kissing girls on the street, so sweet, bought 200 acres right outside of town, it’s going to be valuable out there some day.” The interview with Johnny Allen as the centrepiece includes some pertinent commentary on the media and reveals a well-founded suspicion of the mediatisation of the Aquarius Festival: We have tried to avoid the media actually. But we haven’t succeeded in doing so. Part of the basic idea is that we don’t need to be sold. All the down town press can do is try and interpret you. And by doing that it automatically places it in the wrong sort of context. So we’ve tried to keep it to people writing about the festival to people who will be involved in it. It’s an involvement festival. Coopting The Byron Express as an “involved” party effects a fundamental shift from an external reporting newspaper to a kind of proponent or even propaganda for the Aquarius festival and its ideas, like so many utopian newspapers had done before. It is therefore perhaps inevitable that The Byron Express should disappear very soon after the Aquarius festival. Fiona Martin and Rhonda Ellis explain that Rusty Miller stopped producing the paper because he “found the production schedule exhausting and his readership too small to attract consistent advertising” (5). At any rate, there were only two more issues, one in June–with some follow up reporting of the festival–and another in September 1973, which was almost entirely devoted to environmentally focused features, including an interview with Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal). Byron Bay 2013: Thirty Years of Rusty’s Byron Guide What Rusty did next is fairly well known locally–surfing and teaching people how to surf and a bit of writing. When major local employer Walkers slaughterhouse closed in 1983, he and his wife, social geographer Tricia Shantz, were asked by the local council to help promote Byron Bay as a tourist destination, writing the first Byron guide in 1983-4. Incorporating essays by local personalities and dedicated visitors, the Byron guide perpetuates the ideal of environmental awareness, spiritual experimentation, and respect for the land and sea. Recent contributors have included philosopher Peter Singer, political journalist Kerry O’Brien, and writer John Ralston Saul, and Miller and Shantz always have an essay in there themselves. “People, Politics and Culture” is the new byline for the 2013 edition. And Miller’s opening essay mediates the same utopian desires and environmental community messages that he espoused from the beginning of The Byron Express: The name Byron Bay represents something that we constantly try to articulate. If one was to dream up a menu of situations and conditions to compose a utopia, Australia would be the model of the nation-state and Byron would have many elements of the actual place one might wish to live for the rest of their lives. But of course there is always the danger of excesses in tropical paradises especially when they become famous destinations. Australia is being held to ransom for the ideology that we should be slaves to money and growth at the cost of a degraded and polluted physical and social environment. Byron at least was/is a refuge against this profusion of the so-called real-world perception that holds profit over environment as the way we must choose for our future. Even when writing for a much more commercial medium, Miller retains the countercultural utopian spirit that was crystallised in the Aquarius festival of 1973, and which remains relevant to many of those living in and visiting the Rainbow Region. Miller’s ethos moves beyond the alternative movements and communities to infiltrate travel writing and tourism initiatives in the area today, as evidenced in the Rusty’s Byron Guide essays. By presenting more radical discourses for a mainstream public, Miller together with Shantz have built on the participatory role that he played in launching the region’s first alternative newspaper in 1973 that became albeit briefly the equivalent of a countercultural utopian gazette. Now, he and Shantz effectively play the same role, producing a kind of countercultural form of utopian media for Byron Bay that corresponds to exactly the same criteria mentioned above. Through their free publication, they aim to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the Rainbow Region, focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events. The Byron Bay that Miller and Shantz promote is resolutely utopian, and certainly countercultural if compared to other free publications like The Book, a new shopping guide, or mainstream media elsewhere. Despite this new competition, they are planning the next edition for 2015 with essays to make people think, talk, and understand the region’s issues, so perhaps the counterculture is still holding its own against the mainstream. References Atton, Chris. “What Is ‘Alternative’ Journalism?” Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 4.3 (2003): 267-72. Berger, Bennett M. The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life among Rural Communards. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004. co*ck, Peter H., & Paul F. Perry. “Australia's Alternative Media.” Media Information Australia 6 (1977): 4-13. Couldry, Nick. “Mediation and Alternative Media, or Relocating the Centre of Media and Communication Studies.” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 103, (2002): 24-31. Davis, Dale, John Witzig & Don James. “Rusty Miller.” Encyclopedia of Surfing. 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/entries/miller-rusty›. Downing, John. Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Davis, J.C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Forde, Susan. Challenging the News: The Journalism of Alternative and Independent Media. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2011. ---. “Monitoring the Establishment: The Development of the Alternative Press in Australia” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 87 (May 1998): 114-133. Frobert, Lucien. “French Utopian Socialists as the First Pioneers in Development.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 35 (2011): 729-49. Green, Toby. Thomas More’s Magician: A Novel Account of Utopia in Mexico. London: Phoenix, 2004. Goffman, Ken, & Dan Joy. Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. New York: Villard Books. 2004. Haude, Sigrun. “Anabaptism.” The Reformation World. Ed. Andrew Pettegree. London: Routledge, 2000. 237-256. Jameson, Fredric. Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. Levitas, Ruth. Utopia as Method. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Martin, Fiona, & Rhonda Ellis. “Dropping In, Not Out: The Evolution of the Alternative Press in Byron Shire 1970-2001.” Transformations 2 (2002). 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_02/pdf/MartinEllis.pdf›. McKay, George. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. London: Verso, 1996. Metcalf, Bill. From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality: Cooperative Lifestyles in Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995. ---. Shared Visions, Shared Lives: Communal Living around the Globe. Forres, UK: Findhorn Press, 1996. Miller, Rusty & Tricia Shantz. Turning Point: Surf Portraits and Stories from Bells to Byron 1970-1971. Surf Research. 2012. Molnar, Thomas. Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. London: Tom Stacey, 1972. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Osterlag, Bob. People’s Movements, People’s Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Anchor, 1969. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1-37. Schaer, Roland, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent, eds. Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. New York: New York Public Library/Oxford UP, 2000. Streitmatter, Roger. Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America. Columbia: Columbia UP, 2001. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Ward, Susan, & Kitty van Vuuren. “Belonging to the Rainbow Region: Place, Local Media, and the Construction of Civil and Moral Identities Strategic to Climate Change Adaptability.” Environmental Communication 7.1 (2013): 63-79. Warshaw, Matt. The History of Surfing. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2011. Wilson, Helen. (Ed.). Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University Press, 2003. Widmer, Kingsley. Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts. Ann Arbor, London: UMI Research Press, 1988. Yinger, J. Milton. Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a World Turned Upside Down. New York: The Free Press, 1982.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. Richard Stallman (GNU Manifesto) There is much more to Stallman’s Manifesto […] Suffice it to say that on the surface, it read like a socialist polemic, but I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise. Michael Tiemann (72) The current discourse surrounding the rapid development and deployment of “free” and “open source” software and operating systems is framed by an undeniably utopian impulse. The “openness” of open source software is informed by concerns both practical (freedom from oppressive software production and licensing/copyright schemes) and ideological (the valorisation of anarchic organizational forms, communal production, and public property rights). The utopian impulse that underwrites this discourse is important for many reasons, but what I want to trace here is the trajectory from ideological position to practical action as it relates to differing forms of utopianism. The initial anarcho-socialist utopian move initiated by Richard Stallman’s GNU (GNU’s Not UNIX) Project and Free Software Foundation (FSF) is currently being transformed into an organizational utopia in the form of the Open Source Movement (OSM). The purpose here is not to take sides in the philological/philosophical debate over the definitions and relative merits of “free” versus “open source” software or to lament the passing of a missed opportunity, but to address the intimations of hope and deprival (with apologies to Grant) that can be gleaned from the relationship between utopianism and socio-technological practices. The popularity of open source development ideals and practices indicates a certain dissatisfaction with corporate technoculture on the part of some (many?) of those who work in these institutions. This dissatisfaction is clearly evident in Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto wherein he critiques the shift from public domain to copyrighted software development that has occurred in the last three decades. Recalling Brian Winston’s theorization of technological development, the move toward copyrighted software appears to have come as a result of the increasing diffusion of computing hardware in the 1980’s and the practical realization of software development as an economically rationalized for-profit enterprise. Prior to the broad commodification of software, programmers shared knowledge and code without worrying about software licenses and copyrights, institutionally commodified intellectual property, and non-disclosure agreements (at least according to Stallman’s experience). Stallman’s heroic effort to create the GNU system is thus not only a direct attack on commodified software production, but a consciously utopian attempt to recapture the “open” communal programming practices that existed during the 1960’s and 70’s. The utopian impulse found in this open form of software development is significant precisely because it underwrites recent efforts to reject current copyright regimes and, by extension, techno-industrial oligarchies. This potential is enabled by newly available forms of grassroots software development (code sharing and development via the Internet being the most obvious example). Stallman introduced and encouraged a licensing system that expressly prohibited the copyrighting of software developed using GNU software protocols and standards (termed “copyleft”). The lag between the initial deployment of Stallman’s early software efforts and their uptake by the wider computing community came as increases in computer literacy, technology markets, affordable personal computing power, and broadband CMC networks came along in the 1990’s. The OSM’s recent mobilization around Linux continues and parallels Stallman’s efforts via the adoption of the GNU license and copyleft. While the hallmarks of Stallman’s communal software production system remain, the overall nature of Open Source software is framed by a rather different notion of utopian openness than is evident in Stallman’s manifesto. This brings me to the broader notion of an anarcho-utopianism framed by what Bookchin has identified as the twin goals of individual liberty and social democracy. Claims are already being made that practices related to open source software development and its emergent virtually interconnected organizational form may provide the basis for (re)imagining systems of social governance while simultaneously providing the practical infrastructure by which these new forms may be manifested: The experience of open source development, or even just the acceptance of its value as a model for others, provides a real-life practice for the deeper change in perspective required if we are to move into a more networked and emergent understanding of our world. The local community must be experienced as a place to implement policies, incrementally, that will eventually have an effect on the whole. (Rushkoff 61) Suggestions that the FSF’s and OSM’s methods of software development may serve as a model for more open and democratic policy making resonates with political theory in general, and social democracy and anarchism in particular. But neither the OSM nor the FSF is a political platform. They are simply modalities of software production which find their foundations in communal forms of decision making, intellectual labour, and dissemination. A utopian impulse is nonetheless revealed in the typically vague invocations of political anarchism and social democratic ideals that accompany the discursive promotion and legitimization of these modalities. The FSF advocates a broadly social anarchistic approach allied with a desire to overturn entirely commodified software production. The OSM, on the other hand, is more concerned with a kind of lifestyle anarchism that focuses on increasing programmer and user freedom within existing frameworks of software production and use. For Bookchin, the latter form of anarchism is positive insofar it advocates individual liberty, but it ultimately undermines the broader goals of anarchism by focusing on transient notions of individualism. The result is a situation wherein “the word anarchy will become part of the chic bourgeois vocabulary of the coming century — naughty, rebellious, insouciant, but deliciously safe” (3). It is interesting to note in passim the various discursive entanglements of anarchism and the Internet that have occurred since 1995, the time of Bookchin’s statement. The utopian discourse that weaves its way through the non-technical discussions surrounding GNU, Linux, and other Open Source projects is certainly strong, but it begs the question of exactly what kinds of utopias are being offered ? Henri Lefebvre was rather suspicious of utopian thought because it is so frequently allied with efforts to legitimize nationalistic and totalitarian organizational practices. While suggesting that utopian thought was useful, he would only go so far as to warn that any such thought must avoid notions of a revolution that would simply substitute one state-sanctioned form of organized production with another, arguing instead for a “transformation of society [that] presupposes a collective ownership and management of space [we could say “society’ or even “software” here in place of “space] founded on the permanent participation of the ‘interested parties’, with their multiple, varied and even contradictory interests” (422). For Lefebvre, any useful form of utopianism is not a matter of coming up with alternative state apparatuses, but of somehow creating the conditions through which an open orientation to future possibilities might allow for the foundation of a more socially democratic society. The FSF comes closest to fulfilling this ideal—at least within the realm of computing—insofar its attendant communities are involved less in the creation of a new institutional form than in the propagation of practices and desires for more open forms of software development. As such, the FSF seems to deploy the kind of utopian thinking and practice that Lefebvre finds useful. There is hope (social and computational) in this kind of utopian orientation because its socio-institutional functioning is left forever open-ended by way of its locating productive practices in communal formations. The FSF offers an idealized mode of communally open software development while refusing to provide an overarching and institutionalized organizational form by which it is to be utilized. Borrowing heavily from the FSF’s ideals and practices, the OSM’s efforts to integrate practices of communal software development into contemporary techno-capitalism is not simply an intimation of deprival — a moment to lament the passing of the FSF’s utopian ideals — rather, the OSM constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a moment of actualization whereby the virtual (and utopian) potential future(s) of communal software development cross the practico-material threshold to become manifest practices. Stallman’s GNU existed in the rather rarefied realm of hardcore coders for years before Torvald’s Linux took open/free software principles into the mainstream. The moment of actualization was not simply technical (available hardware, software, programmers, networks, etc.): it was the recognition that communal “copylefted” programming could “find a place” in the everyday structures of IT industries, services, and markets. It is the moment when Tiemann sees a business plan in Stallman’s “socialist polemic”. At this point that the utopian orientation and ideals promoted by the FSF transforms into an organizational utopia spearheaded by the OSM. The debate over this transformation shows few signs of abating any time soon. Stallman feels that Eric Raymond’s (the spiritual “leader” of the OSM) promotion of a potentially massive, and certainly for-profit, industry founded on the implementation and support of open source software defeats the basic (utopian) principles of free software. Echoing Bookchin’s concerns about lifestyle anarchism, Stallman worries that the OSM will simply result in the re-introduction of all of those things that drove him out of institutional software development in the first place: “the rhetoric of ‘open source’ focuses on the potential to make high quality, powerful software, but shuns the ideas of freedom, community and principle” (1999:70) . The FSF’s social utopianism thus appears to provide the productive content, but not the political form, for the more practically minded utopianism of the OSM, which offers an organizational utopia more akin to the “substitutive” utopias disavowed by Lefebvre. As Martin Parker argues, utopian thought and practice tends to be organizational in nature: “most, if not all, fictional and actual utopias rely on a re-formulation of principles of social order. They are in that sense organized, though often on different principles to the market managerial hegemony” (217-218). Stallman’s open anarcho-utopianism commits to an avoidance of market managerial hegemony. The OSM, however, not only cooperates with market hegemony, it seeks to find a place within it. This is a crucial difference. The openness introduced by the FSF is incorporated by the OSM only at the level of software production itself, thus containing and integrating its communal practices in the service of existing market needs and structures. The OSM is thus likely only a threat to Microsoft, and this only because it proffers a new business model. Indeed, the popular appeal of the OSM’s version of open source as a metaphor and model for businesses suggests that it may be an easily, and safely, appropriated set of practices. On the other hand, the FSF’s promotion of a more “socialist” approach to software production and use is based on the same basic programming practices and it will therefore be rather difficult to exact some sort of industrial control of copyright and/or intellectual property where open source software is concerned. Whether or not these two approaches are compatible, or if users will push their development into as yet unseen directions, is by no means clear at this point. With open source development poised on the verge of being the “next big thing”, the manifest expression of its anarchic utopian impulse in the form of treatises and essays is somewhat limited insofar as the community is primarily composed of programmers rather than social theorists. Nevertheless, the utopian impulse is becoming more clearly expressed where it perhaps matters most: as an emergent set of practices in the domain of software production and use. The “kernel” of openness introduced by both the FSF and the OSM thus needs to be addressed in detail, and sooner rather than later, because it is in the struggle between these two forms of anarchic utopianism that the broader sociopolitical implications of a radically different form of software production will be played out. About the Author Dale Bradley is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Communications, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University, Canada. His research interests include the discursive analysis of contemporary technoculture and the historical emergence of cybersociety. Email: dbradley@brocku.ca Works Cited Bookchin, Murray. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism. San Francisco: AK Press, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1987. Grant, George. Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford UK: Blackwell, 1991. Parker, Martin. ‘Utopia and the Organizational Imagination: Eutopia’. Utopia and Organization. Ed. Martin Parker. Oxford UK: Blackwell, 2002. Rushkoff, Douglas. Open Source Democracy. London: Demos, 2003. Full text available under open source licensing at: http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/opensourcedemocracy_page292.aspx http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html Stallman, Richard. ‘The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement’. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Eds. Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman & Mark Stone. Sebastopol CA: O’Reilly & Associates,1999. Tiemann, Michael. ‘Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur’s Account’. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Eds. Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman & Mark Stone. O’Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol CA: 1999 Winston, Brian. Misunderstanding Media. Harvard U Press, Cambridge MA: 1986 For a brief overview of the debate between Stallman and Raymond, see ‘Whence the Source: Untangling the Open Source/Free Software Debate’ at: http://opensource.oreilly.com/news/scoville_0399.html) Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bradley, Dale. "Open Source, Anarchy, and the Utopian Impulse" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/03_Bradley.php>. APA Style Bradley, D. (2004, Jul1). Open Source, Anarchy, and the Utopian Impulse. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/03_Bradley.php>

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

There is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points it connects up, certain relatively free or unbounded points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. (Deleuze, “Foucault” 37) Monty Cantsin: Why do we use a pervert software robot to exploit our collective consensual mind? Letitia: Because we want the thief to be a digital entity. Monty Cantsin: But isn’t this really blasphemic? Letitia: Yes, but god – in our case a meta-co*cktail of authorship and copyright – can not be trusted anymore. (Amazon Noir, “Dialogue”) In 2006, some 3,000 digital copies of books were silently “stolen” from online retailer Amazon.com by targeting vulnerabilities in the “Search inside the Book” feature from the company’s website. Over several weeks, between July and October, a specially designed software program bombarded the Search Inside!™ interface with multiple requests, assembling full versions of texts and distributing them across peer-to-peer networks (P2P). Rather than a purely malicious and anonymous hack, however, the “heist” was publicised as a tactical media performance, Amazon Noir, produced by self-proclaimed super-villains Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, and Ubermorgen.com. While controversially directed at highlighting the infrastructures that materially enforce property rights and access to knowledge online, the exploit additionally interrogated its own interventionist status as theoretically and politically ambiguous. That the “thief” was represented as a digital entity or machinic process (operating on the very terrain where exchange is differentiated) and the emergent act of “piracy” was fictionalised through the genre of noir conveys something of the indeterminacy or immensurability of the event. In this short article, I discuss some political aspects of intellectual property in relation to the complexities of Amazon Noir, particularly in the context of control, technological action, and discourses of freedom. Software, Piracy As a force of distribution, the Internet is continually subject to controversies concerning flows and permutations of agency. While often directed by discourses cast in terms of either radical autonomy or control, the technical constitution of these digital systems is more regularly a case of establishing structures of operation, codified rules, or conditions of possibility; that is, of guiding social processes and relations (McKenzie, “Cutting Code” 1-19). Software, as a medium through which such communication unfolds and becomes organised, is difficult to conceptualise as a result of being so event-orientated. There lies a complicated logic of contingency and calculation at its centre, a dimension exacerbated by the global scale of informational networks, where the inability to comprehend an environment that exceeds the limits of individual experience is frequently expressed through desires, anxieties, paranoia. Unsurprisingly, cautionary accounts and moral panics on identity theft, email fraud, p*rnography, surveillance, hackers, and computer viruses are as commonplace as those narratives advocating user interactivity. When analysing digital systems, cultural theory often struggles to describe forces that dictate movement and relations between disparate entities composed by code, an aspect heightened by the intensive movement of informational networks where differences are worked out through the constant exposure to unpredictability and chance (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning”). Such volatility partially explains the recent turn to distribution in media theory, as once durable networks for constructing economic difference – organising information in space and time (“at a distance”), accelerating or delaying its delivery – appear contingent, unstable, or consistently irregular (Cubitt 194). Attributing actions to users, programmers, or the software itself is a difficult task when faced with these states of co-emergence, especially in the context of sharing knowledge and distributing media content. Exchanges between corporate entities, mainstream media, popular cultural producers, and legal institutions over P2P networks represent an ongoing controversy in this respect, with numerous stakeholders competing between investments in property, innovation, piracy, and publics. Beginning to understand this problematic landscape is an urgent task, especially in relation to the technological dynamics that organised and propel such antagonisms. In the influential fragment, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze describes the historical passage from modern forms of organised enclosure (the prison, clinic, factory) to the contemporary arrangement of relational apparatuses and open systems as being materially provoked by – but not limited to – the mass deployment of networked digital technologies. In his analysis, the disciplinary mode most famously described by Foucault is spatially extended to informational systems based on code and flexibility. According to Deleuze, these cybernetic machines are connected into apparatuses that aim for intrusive monitoring: “in a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long” (“Control and Becoming” 175). Such a constant networking of behaviour is described as a shift from “molds” to “modulation,” where controls become “a self-transmuting molding changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (“Postscript” 179). Accordingly, the crisis underpinning civil institutions is consistent with the generalisation of disciplinary logics across social space, forming an intensive modulation of everyday life, but one ambiguously associated with socio-technical ensembles. The precise dynamics of this epistemic shift are significant in terms of political agency: while control implies an arrangement capable of absorbing massive contingency, a series of complex instabilities actually mark its operation. Noise, viral contamination, and piracy are identified as key points of discontinuity; they appear as divisions or “errors” that force change by promoting indeterminacies in a system that would otherwise appear infinitely calculable, programmable, and predictable. The rendering of piracy as a tactic of resistance, a technique capable of levelling out the uneven economic field of global capitalism, has become a predictable catch-cry for political activists. In their analysis of multitude, for instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe the contradictions of post-Fordist production as conjuring forth a tendency for labour to “become common.” That is, as productivity depends on flexibility, communication, and cognitive skills, directed by the cultivation of an ideal entrepreneurial or flexible subject, the greater the possibilities for self-organised forms of living that significantly challenge its operation. In this case, intellectual property exemplifies such a spiralling paradoxical logic, since “the infinite reproducibility central to these immaterial forms of property directly undermines any such construction of scarcity” (Hardt and Negri 180). The implications of the filesharing program Napster, accordingly, are read as not merely directed toward theft, but in relation to the private character of the property itself; a kind of social piracy is perpetuated that is viewed as radically recomposing social resources and relations. Ravi Sundaram, a co-founder of the Sarai new media initiative in Delhi, has meanwhile drawn attention to the existence of “pirate modernities” capable of being actualised when individuals or local groups gain illegitimate access to distributive media technologies; these are worlds of “innovation and non-legality,” of electronic survival strategies that partake in cultures of dispersal and escape simple classification (94). Meanwhile, pirate entrepreneurs Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleische – associated with the notorious Piratbyrn – have promoted the bleeding away of Hollywood profits through fully deployed P2P networks, with the intention of pushing filesharing dynamics to an extreme in order to radicalise the potential for social change (“Copies and Context”). From an aesthetic perspective, such activist theories are complemented by the affective register of appropriation art, a movement broadly conceived in terms of antagonistically liberating knowledge from the confines of intellectual property: “those who pirate and hijack owned material, attempting to free information, art, film, and music – the rhetoric of our cultural life – from what they see as the prison of private ownership” (Harold 114). These “unruly” escape attempts are pursued through various modes of engagement, from experimental performances with legislative infrastructures (i.e. Kembrew McLeod’s patenting of the phrase “freedom of expression”) to musical remix projects, such as the work of Negativland, John Oswald, RTMark, Detritus, Illegal Art, and the Evolution Control Committee. Amazon Noir, while similarly engaging with questions of ownership, is distinguished by specifically targeting information communication systems and finding “niches” or gaps between overlapping networks of control and economic governance. Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com (meaning ‘Day after Tomorrow,’ or ‘Super-Tomorrow’) actually describe their work as “research-based”: “we not are opportunistic, money-driven or success-driven, our central motivation is to gain as much information as possible as fast as possible as chaotic as possible and to redistribute this information via digital channels” (“Interview with Ubermorgen”). This has led to experiments like Google Will Eat Itself (2005) and the construction of the automated software thief against Amazon.com, as process-based explorations of technological action. Agency, Distribution Deleuze’s “postscript” on control has proven massively influential for new media art by introducing a series of key questions on power (or desire) and digital networks. As a social diagram, however, control should be understood as a partial rather than totalising map of relations, referring to the augmentation of disciplinary power in specific technological settings. While control is a conceptual regime that refers to open-ended terrains beyond the architectural locales of enclosure, implying a move toward informational networks, data solicitation, and cybernetic feedback, there remains a peculiar contingent dimension to its limits. For example, software code is typically designed to remain cycling until user input is provided. There is a specifically immanent and localised quality to its actions that might be taken as exemplary of control as a continuously modulating affective materialism. The outcome is a heightened sense of bounded emergencies that are either flattened out or absorbed through reconstitution; however, these are never linear gestures of containment. As Tiziana Terranova observes, control operates through multilayered mechanisms of order and organisation: “messy local assemblages and compositions, subjective and machinic, characterised by different types of psychic investments, that cannot be the subject of normative, pre-made political judgments, but which need to be thought anew again and again, each time, in specific dynamic compositions” (“Of Sense and Sensibility” 34). This event-orientated vitality accounts for the political ambitions of tactical media as opening out communication channels through selective “transversal” targeting. Amazon Noir, for that reason, is pitched specifically against the material processes of communication. The system used to harvest the content from “Search inside the Book” is described as “robot-perversion-technology,” based on a network of four servers around the globe, each with a specific function: one located in the United States that retrieved (or “sucked”) the books from the site, one in Russia that injected the assembled documents onto P2P networks and two in Europe that coordinated the action via intelligent automated programs (see “The Diagram”). According to the “villains,” the main goal was to steal all 150,000 books from Search Inside!™ then use the same technology to steal books from the “Google Print Service” (the exploit was limited only by the amount of technological resources financially available, but there are apparent plans to improve the technique by reinvesting the money received through the settlement with Amazon.com not to publicise the hack). In terms of informational culture, this system resembles a machinic process directed at redistributing copyright content; “The Diagram” visualises key processes that define digital piracy as an emergent phenomenon within an open-ended and responsive milieu. That is, the static image foregrounds something of the activity of copying being a technological action that complicates any analysis focusing purely on copyright as content. In this respect, intellectual property rights are revealed as being entangled within information architectures as communication management and cultural recombination – dissipated and enforced by a measured interplay between openness and obstruction, resonance and emergence (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning” 52). To understand data distribution requires an acknowledgement of these underlying nonhuman relations that allow for such informational exchanges. It requires an understanding of the permutations of agency carried along by digital entities. According to Lawrence Lessig’s influential argument, code is not merely an object of governance, but has an overt legislative function itself. Within the informational environments of software, “a law is defined, not through a statue, but through the code that governs the space” (20). These points of symmetry are understood as concretised social values: they are material standards that regulate flow. Similarly, Alexander Galloway describes computer protocols as non-institutional “etiquette for autonomous agents,” or “conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system” (7). In his analysis, these agreed-upon standardised actions operate as a style of management fostered by contradiction: progressive though reactionary, encouraging diversity by striving for the universal, synonymous with possibility but completely predetermined, and so on (243-244). Needless to say, political uncertainties arise from a paradigm that generates internal material obscurities through a constant twinning of freedom and control. For Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, these Cold War systems subvert the possibilities for any actual experience of autonomy by generalising paranoia through constant intrusion and reducing social problems to questions of technological optimisation (1-30). In confrontation with these seemingly ubiquitous regulatory structures, cultural theory requires a critical vocabulary differentiated from computer engineering to account for the sociality that permeates through and concatenates technological realities. In his recent work on “mundane” devices, software and code, Adrian McKenzie introduces a relevant analytic approach in the concept of technological action as something that both abstracts and concretises relations in a diffusion of collective-individual forces. Drawing on the thought of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, he uses the term “transduction” to identify a key characteristic of technology in the relational process of becoming, or ontogenesis. This is described as bringing together disparate things into composites of relations that evolve and propagate a structure throughout a domain, or “overflow existing modalities of perception and movement on many scales” (“Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action” 201). Most importantly, these innovative diffusions or contagions occur by bridging states of difference or incompatibilities. Technological action, therefore, arises from a particular type of disjunctive relation between an entity and something external to itself: “in making this relation, technical action changes not only the ensemble, but also the form of life of its agent. Abstraction comes into being and begins to subsume or reconfigure existing relations between the inside and outside” (203). Here, reciprocal interactions between two states or dimensions actualise disparate potentials through metastability: an equilibrium that proliferates, unfolds, and drives individuation. While drawing on cybernetics and dealing with specific technological platforms, McKenzie’s work can be extended to describe the significance of informational devices throughout control societies as a whole, particularly as a predictive and future-orientated force that thrives on staged conflicts. Moreover, being a non-deterministic technical theory, it additionally speaks to new tendencies in regimes of production that harness cognition and cooperation through specially designed infrastructures to enact persistent innovation without any end-point, final goal or natural target (Thrift 283-295). Here, the interface between intellectual property and reproduction can be seen as a site of variation that weaves together disparate objects and entities by imbrication in social life itself. These are specific acts of interference that propel relations toward unforeseen conclusions by drawing on memories, attention spans, material-technical traits, and so on. The focus lies on performance, context, and design “as a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration” (Thrift 295). This later point is demonstrated in recent scholarly treatments of filesharing networks as media ecologies. Kate Crawford, for instance, describes the movement of P2P as processual or adaptive, comparable to technological action, marked by key transitions from partially decentralised architectures such as Napster, to the fully distributed systems of Gnutella and seeded swarm-based networks like BitTorrent (30-39). Each of these technologies can be understood as a response to various legal incursions, producing radically dissimilar socio-technological dynamics and emergent trends for how agency is modulated by informational exchanges. Indeed, even these aberrant formations are characterised by modes of commodification that continually spillover and feedback on themselves, repositioning markets and commodities in doing so, from MP3s to iPods, P2P to broadband subscription rates. However, one key limitation of this ontological approach is apparent when dealing with the sheer scale of activity involved, where mass participation elicits certain degrees of obscurity and relative safety in numbers. This represents an obvious problem for analysis, as dynamics can easily be identified in the broadest conceptual sense, without any understanding of the specific contexts of usage, political impacts, and economic effects for participants in their everyday consumptive habits. Large-scale distributed ensembles are “problematic” in their technological constitution, as a result. They are sites of expansive overflow that provoke an equivalent individuation of thought, as the Recording Industry Association of America observes on their educational website: “because of the nature of the theft, the damage is not always easy to calculate but not hard to envision” (“Piracy”). The politics of the filesharing debate, in this sense, depends on the command of imaginaries; that is, being able to conceptualise an overarching structural consistency to a persistent and adaptive ecology. As a mode of tactical intervention, Amazon Noir dramatises these ambiguities by framing technological action through the fictional sensibilities of narrative genre. Ambiguity, Control The extensive use of imagery and iconography from “noir” can be understood as an explicit reference to the increasing criminalisation of copyright violation through digital technologies. However, the term also refers to the indistinct or uncertain effects produced by this tactical intervention: who are the “bad guys” or the “good guys”? Are positions like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (something like freedom or tyranny) so easily identified and distinguished? As Paolo Cirio explains, this political disposition is deliberately kept obscure in the project: “it’s a representation of the actual ambiguity about copyright issues, where every case seems to lack a moral or ethical basis” (“Amazon Noir Interview”). While user communications made available on the site clearly identify culprits (describing the project as jeopardising arts funding, as both irresponsible and arrogant), the self-description of the artists as political “failures” highlights the uncertainty regarding the project’s qualities as a force of long-term social renewal: Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com had daily shootouts with the global mass-media, Cirio continuously pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Ludovico and Bernhard resisted kickback-bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. (“Press Release”) Here, the adaptive and flexible qualities of informatic commodities and computational systems of distribution are knowingly posited as critical limits; in a certain sense, the project fails technologically in order to succeed conceptually. From a cynical perspective, this might be interpreted as guaranteeing authenticity by insisting on the useless or non-instrumental quality of art. However, through this process, Amazon Noir illustrates how forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation. Just as hackers are legitimately employed to challenge the durability of network exchanges, malfunctions are relied upon as potential sources of future information. Indeed, the notion of demonstrating ‘autonomy’ by illustrating the shortcomings of software is entirely consistent with the logic of control as a modulating organisational diagram. These so-called “circuit breakers” are positioned as points of bifurcation that open up new systems and encompass a more general “abstract machine” or tendency governing contemporary capitalism (Parikka 300). As a consequence, the ambiguities of Amazon Noir emerge not just from the contrary articulation of intellectual property and digital technology, but additionally through the concept of thinking “resistance” simultaneously with regimes of control. This tension is apparent in Galloway’s analysis of the cybernetic machines that are synonymous with the operation of Deleuzian control societies – i.e. “computerised information management” – where tactical media are posited as potential modes of contestation against the tyranny of code, “able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people’s real desires” (176). While pushing a system into a state of hypertrophy to reform digital architectures might represent a possible technique that produces a space through which to imagine something like “our” freedom, it still leaves unexamined the desire for reformation itself as nurtured by and produced through the coupling of cybernetics, information theory, and distributed networking. This draws into focus the significance of McKenzie’s Simondon-inspired cybernetic perspective on socio-technological ensembles as being always-already predetermined by and driven through asymmetries or difference. As Chun observes, consequently, there is no paradox between resistance and capture since “control and freedom are not opposites, but different sides of the same coin: just as discipline served as a grid on which liberty was established, control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness” (71). Why “openness” should be so readily equated with a state of being free represents a major unexamined presumption of digital culture, and leads to the associated predicament of attempting to think of how this freedom has become something one cannot not desire. If Amazon Noir has political currency in this context, however, it emerges from a capacity to recognise how informational networks channel desire, memories, and imaginative visions rather than just cultivated antagonisms and counterintuitive economics. As a final point, it is worth observing that the project was initiated without publicity until the settlement with Amazon.com. There is, as a consequence, nothing to suggest that this subversive “event” might have actually occurred, a feeling heightened by the abstractions of software entities. To the extent that we believe in “the big book heist,” that such an act is even possible, is a gauge through which the paranoia of control societies is illuminated as a longing or desire for autonomy. As Hakim Bey observes in his conceptualisation of “pirate utopias,” such fleeting encounters with the imaginaries of freedom flow back into the experience of the everyday as political instantiations of utopian hope. Amazon Noir, with all its underlying ethical ambiguities, presents us with a challenge to rethink these affective investments by considering our profound weaknesses to master the complexities and constant intrusions of control. It provides an opportunity to conceive of a future that begins with limits and limitations as immanently central, even foundational, to our deep interconnection with socio-technological ensembles. References “Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime.” http://www.amazon-noir.com/>. Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia, 1991. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Crawford, Kate. “Adaptation: Tracking the Ecologies of Music and Peer-to-Peer Networks.” Media International Australia 114 (2005): 30-39. Cubitt, Sean. “Distribution and Media Flows.” Cultural Politics 1.2 (2005): 193-214. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. ———. “Control and Becoming.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 169-176. ———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 177-182. Eriksson, Magnus, and Rasmus Fleische. “Copies and Context in the Age of Cultural Abundance.” Online posting. 5 June 2007. Nettime 25 Aug 2007. Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Harold, Christine. OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. McKenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. ———. “The Strange Meshing of Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action.” Culture, Theory and Critique 47.2 (2006): 197-212. Parikka, Jussi. “Contagion and Repetition: On the Viral Logic of Network Culture.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 7.2 (2007): 287-308. “Piracy Online.” Recording Industry Association of America. 28 Aug 2007. http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php>. Sundaram, Ravi. “Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India.” Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain. Delhi, Sarai Media Lab, 2001. 93-99. http://www.sarai.net>. Terranova, Tiziana. “Communication beyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics of Information.” Social Text 22.3 (2004): 51-73. ———. “Of Sense and Sensibility: Immaterial Labour in Open Systems.” DATA Browser 03 – Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. Ed. Joasia Krysa. New York: Autonomedia, 2006. 27-38. Thrift, Nigel. “Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification.” Economy and Society 35.2 (2006): 279-306. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dieter, Michael. "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>. APA Style Dieter, M. (Oct. 2007) "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Imaginings of cities are powerful...imagination can be either an escape...or an act of resistance or both (Bridge and Watson 2000: 16). Imagination and the city are closely entwined for Gary Bridges and Sophie Watson who organise the relationship between the city and the imagination in two areas: how the city affects the imagination and how the city is imagined. They see that the city provides both constraints and stimulus on the imagination of all its inhabitants. From screenwriters to urban planners to policy makers to city visitors from suburbs or country towns, each person has his or her imagined city and this is reflected in the way we live (lifestyle), where we choose to live (urban versus suburban) and how we use public and private space. The effects of the city on the imagination are also apparent from the way cities are represented in film, the way they are planned and how they are produced in a range of discourses. However, these diffuse imaginations can be opposing and it these opposing imaginations that forge the distinctions between an imagined city and an urban imagination. So where is this evident? The most visible evidence is found in the use and role of public space. Both Mike Davis and George Morgan document how public space is viewed as a threat giving rise to what Davis calls defensible space and a clear demarcation between public and private space (1994, 79). Davis witnesses that this practice, when applied, results in a fortress mentality of guarded properties and walled-in private suburbs that is destroying accessible public space(1992, 226). Documenting a more sociological approach is Jane Jacobs' argument that the city and social interactions within are a street ballet (2000, 107) and Lewis Mumford's notion of urban drama (2000, 92). This sociological approach views public space as providing an opportunity for people to invest in and interact. These longstanding opposing views toward public space as either a threat or an opportunity are a large part of the urban imagination and have consequences for the way in which the city is designed and planned. General concerns on security are evident by the ever-increasing reliance on architecture to provide security. This is most noticeable in urban areas where the rise of defensible space is apparent. Defensible space can be achieved by applying a commonly accepted practice amongst urban planners known as CPTED (pronounced sep-ted and standing for Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design). CPTED recognises that proper design and effective use of the built environment can lead to a reduction in the fear and incidence of crime, and an improvement in the quality of life (Howe, http://www.cpted-watch.com, 2002). CPTED principles are built on four overlapping strategies of natural surveillance, territorial reinforcement, natural access control and target hardening. These strategies are equally apparent in urban theorists like Morgan, Davis, Bridges and Watson; indeed even Jacobs can be seen as an early pioneer of CPTED with her views on natural surveillance. However, the application of these strategies differ in the separation of public and private space and how public space is designed and planned. Davis may concede CPTED's existence as perhaps only one small component of urban theory and practice that, for the most part, he argues, ignores the existing trend of fortifying the built and natural environment: Contemporary urban theory has been strangely silent about the militarisation of city life that is so grimly visible at street level (1992, 223). For Davis, who is referring to Los Angeles, Hollywood fiction has, ironically, been more realistic and politically perceptive in its representations of the urban. And these representations support Bridge and Watson's view of how the city affects the imagination as they only extrapolate from actually existing trends (Davis 1992, 223). Davis also sees a post-Liberal Los Angeles obsessed with the physical (security systems) and collaterally with policing of social boundaries through architecture. Such developments though are not unique to LA. In Australia the use of CPTED principles, though relatively low-key, are applied to the new Brisbane Busway Stations. In this instance it is the use of natural surveillance, a design concept primarily aimed at maximising the visibility of people and space through site location (parallel to highly utilised suburban streets and a major freeway) and site design (use of glass walls and bright lighting). The application of CPTED principles indicate that the role public space plays in a community has been in the imagination of the planning fraternity and the wider public for many years. Whilst the Brisbane Busway initiative may seem tame in comparison to enfortressed LA, Morgan reveals how CPTED principles have been key to urban and suburban planners in Australia since the late-nineteenth century and involved the imposition of middle-class ideals of how and where to live. Drawing on Sydney's urban planning response to two contrasting moral panics in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Morgan locates an ironic contrast between the fear of a dense and public sociability at the turn of the [20th] century and the contemporary fear of urban crime which is based on lack of sociability in street spaces that are not occupied or controlled (1994, 80). This contrast depicts the use of public space as associated with inner urban living to the more private existence of outer suburban living which has its roots in the urban planning undertaken in the late nineteenth century. The planning at that time was a response, in the main, to middle-class fears of social ills and disease that over-crowding in the inner city were thought to produce. This same middle class further extended their influence by pushing a population outward and in the process changed the use of public space by disconnecting the existing social and cultural networks of established communities. This outward movement eventuated in suburbs that were founded on the modernist thought of progress reflected in decentralisation, growth in car ownership and a denial of traditional urban life which were seen as dissonant and unacceptable (Morgan 1994, 82). These unacceptable traditions of a gregarious street life were controlled ultimately by urban planning through the design of new suburbs that were sold as a utopian landscape that offered land ownership a concept only previously dreamt or imagined. As the populace spread and thinned out, new communities developed. These new suburban arrivals adapted similar lifestyles and a degree of hom*ogeneity formed within the community that eventually established and then fostered a socio-psychological division between public and private personas as suburban living nurtured a more private existence (1994, 84). This division is a very real danger to Jacobs' idea of a city as a street ballet and to Mumford's notion of urban drama as it takes the view of public space as not a place to stop and interact but as a space to be used, in many cases literally, as a thoroughfare to another private destination. This use of public space is exemplified in the everyday activity of driving a private vehicle straight from work to home. And, more importantly, this use of public space has detrimental affects on the role of public space, most noticeably on streets and sidewalks a city's most public of spaces. Jacobs recognises that the key to making a neighbourhood a community and making a city livable is, first and foremost, the use and safety of the street: Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs, Jacobs suggests, and if a city's streets look interesting, the city does so (107). Jacobs addresses the issue of safety as the fundamental task of a city street and sidewalk and is critical of planners, and their inability to understand that people and their subsequent activity leads to attracting even more people to use or watch a sidewalk. By indicating that nobody watches an empty street, Jacobs implies that people do not seek emptiness from an urban setting and by removing the players from the drama also means removing the audience: in this case, the street's natural observers or, in CPTED terms, the safety net that natural surveillance can provide. Despite this apparent resonance between CPTED planning and critical urban theory, there are important distinctions. Mumford's sociological view of what a city is supports Morgan's and Jacobs' views that planners often did not understand the social web of community. In questioning the role of the city as a social institution Mumford identifies a handicap in that planners have had no clear notion of the social functions of the city...(and)... derive these functions from a cursory survey of the activities and interests of the contemporary urban scene (2000, 93). The risk as witnessed with the spread of garrison-suburbia is that the physical organisation of the city may deflate the essential drama and imaginative spur that Mumford believes a city requires. When Mumford identifies that the city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theatre and is the theatre (2000, 94) he is urging that planning considers the fulfilment of people's imaginations, or put another way, their fantasies. The physical layout and organisation of a city is not an end in itself and it must not solely shelter the human body but also the human imagination; it must not simply be at the convenience of industry but must account for social and cultural needs. Or as Mumford states the physical organisation of a city, its industries and its markets, its lines of communication and traffic, must be subservient to its social needs (2000, 94). These social needs can be physically catered for by urban design if public space is approached by planners as an opportunity rather than a threat. Viewing public space as a threat has seen planning and urban design respond with defensible space and a fortress mentality that affects the imagination by playing on fear and security with a preference for separating public and private space. In contrast, by viewing public space as an opportunity, the response of planning and urban design could then deliver public space that inspires and drives the imagination through nurturing social interaction and allowing people to be legitimately active. The response by planning and urban design is then a critical one and plays a very influential role in shaping both the imagination and the material space of the lived city. References Bridge, Gary and Watson, Sophie (2000) A Companion to the City, Blackwell, Oxford, M.A. (Chapter 1, City Imaginaries). Davis, Mike (1992) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Vintage, London (Chapter 4, Fortress L.A., 223-8). Howe, Dorinda R. (2002) Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, CPTED Handbook, http://www.cpted-watch.com Jacobs, Jane (2001) (1961) The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety in R.LeGates and F.Stout (eds) The City Reader, 2nd edition, Routledge, London. 106-11. Morgan, George (1994) Actsof Enclosure: Crime and Defensible Space in Contemporary Cities, in K.Gibson & S.Watson (eds) Metroplois Now: Planning and the Urban in Contemporary Australia, Pluto, Sydney, Chapter 5. 78-90. Mumford, Lewis (2000) What is a City? in R.LeGates & F.Stout (eds) The City Reader, 2nd edition, Routledge, London. 92-6. Links http://www.cpted-watch.com Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bennett, Simon A.. "A City Divided" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/divided.php>. Chicago Style Bennett, Simon A., "A City Divided" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/divided.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Bennett, Simon A.. (2002) A City Divided. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/divided.php> ([your date of access]).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction Many social media tools and services are free to use. This fact often leads users to the mistaken presumption that the associated data generated whilst utilising these tools and services is without value. Users often focus on the social and presumed ephemeral nature of communication – imagining something that happens but then has no further record or value, akin to a telephone call – while corporations behind these tools tend to focus on the media side, the lasting value of these traces which can be combined, mined and analysed for new insight and revenue generation. This paper seeks to explore this social media contradiction in two ways. Firstly, a cursory examination of Google and Facebook will demonstrate how data mining and analysis are core practices for these corporate giants, central to their functioning, development and expansion. Yet the public rhetoric of these companies is not about the exchange of personal information for services, but rather the more utopian notions of organising the world’s information, or bringing everyone together through sharing. The second section of this paper examines some of the core ramifications of death in terms of social media, asking what happens when a user suddenly exists only as recorded media fragments, at least in digital terms. Death, at first glance, renders users (or post-users) without agency or, implicitly, value to companies which data-mine ongoing social practices. Yet the emergence of digital legacy management highlights the value of the data generated using social media, a value which persists even after death. The question of a digital estate thus illustrates the cumulative value of social media as media, even on an individual level. The ways Facebook and Google approach digital death are examined, demonstrating policies which enshrine the agency and rights of living users, but become far less coherent posthumously. Finally, along with digital legacy management, I will examine the potential for posthumous digital legacies which may, in some macabre ways, actually reanimate some aspects of a deceased user’s presence, such as the Lives On service which touts the slogan “when your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting”. Cumulatively, mapping digital legacy management by large online corporations, and the affordances of more focussed services dealing with digital death, illustrates the value of data generated by social media users, and the continued importance of the data even beyond the grave. Google While Google is universally synonymous with search, and is the world’s dominant search engine, it is less widely understood that one of the core elements keeping Google’s search results relevant is a complex operation mining user data. Different tools in Google’s array of services mine data in different ways (Zimmer, “Gaze”). Gmail, for example, uses algorithms to analyse an individual’s email in order to display the most relevant related advertising. This form of data mining is comparatively well known, with most Gmail users knowingly and willingly accepting more personalised advertising in order to use Google’s email service. However, the majority of people using Google’s search engine are unaware that search, too, is increasingly driven by the tracking, analysis and refining of results on the basis of user activity (Zimmer, “Externalities”). As Alexander Halavais (160–180) quite rightly argues, recent focus on the idea of social search – the deeper integration of social network information in gauging search results – is oxymoronic; all search, at least for Google, is driven by deep analysis of personal and aggregated social data. Indeed, the success of Google’s mining of user data has led to concerns that often invisible processes of customisation and personalisation will mean that the supposedly independent or objective algorithms producing Google’s search results will actually yield a different result for every person. As Siva Vaidhyanathan laments: “as users in a diverse array of countries train Google’s algorithms to respond to specialized queries with localised results, each place in the world will have a different list of what is important, true, or ‘relevant’ in response to any query” (138). Personalisation and customisation are not inherently problematic, and frequently do enhance the relevance of search results, but the main objection raised by critics is not Google’s data mining, but the lack of transparency in the way data are recorded, stored and utilised. Eli Pariser, for example, laments the development of a ubiquitous “filter bubble” wherein all search results are personalised and subjective but are hidden behind the rhetoric of computer-driven algorithmic objectivity (Pariser). While data mining informs and drives many of Google’s tools and services, the cumulative value of these captured fragments of information is best demonstrated by the new service Google Now. Google Now is a mobile app which delivers an ongoing stream of search results but without the need for user input. Google Now extrapolates the rhythms of a person’s life, their interests and their routines in order to algorithmically determine what information will be needed next, and automatically displays it on a user’s mobile device. Clearly Google Now is an extremely valuable and clever tool, and the more information a user shares, the better the ongoing customised results will be, demonstrating the direct exchange value of personal data: total personalisation requires total transparency. Each individual user will need to judge whether they wish to share with Google the considerable amount of personal information needed to make Google Now work. The pressing ethical question that remains is whether Google will ensure that users are sufficiently aware of the amount of data and personal privacy they are exchanging in order to utilise such a service. Facebook Facebook began as a closed network, open only to students at American universities, but has transformed over time to a much wider and more open network, with over a billion registered users. Facebook has continually reinvented their interface, protocols and design, often altering both privacy policies and users’ experience of privacy, and often meeting significant and vocal resistance in the process (boyd). The data mining performed by social networking service Facebook is also extensive, although primarily aimed at refining the way that targeted advertising appears on the platform. In 2007 Facebook partnered with various retail loyalty services and combined these records with Facebook’s user data. This information was used to power Facebook’s Beacon service, which added details of users’ retail history to their Facebook news feed (for example, “Tama just purchased a HTC One”). The impact of all of these seemingly unrelated purchases turning up in many people’s feeds suddenly revealed the complex surveillance, data mining and sharing of these data that was taking place (Doyle and Fraser). However, as Beacon was turned on, without consultation, for all Facebook users, there was a sizable backlash that meant that Facebook had to initially switch the service to opt-in, and then discontinue it altogether. While Beacon has been long since erased, it is notable that in early 2013 Facebook announced that they have strengthened partnerships with data mining and profiling companies, including Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai, which harness customer information from a range of loyalty cards, to further refine the targeting ability offered to advertisers using Facebook (Hof). Facebook’s data mining, surveillance and integration across companies is thus still going on, but no longer directly visible to Facebook users, except in terms of the targeted advertisem*nts which appear on the service. Facebook is also a platform, providing a scaffolding and gateway to many other tools and services. In order to use social games such as Zynga’s Farmville, Facebook users agree to allow Zynga to access their profile information, and use Facebook to authenticate their identity. Zynga has been unashamedly at the forefront of user analytics and data mining, attempting to algorithmically determine the best way to make virtual goods within their games attractive enough for users to pay for them with real money. Indeed, during a conference presentation, Zynga Vice President Ken Rudin stated outright that Zynga is “an analytics company masquerading as a games company” (Rudin). I would contend that this masquerade succeeds, as few Farmville players are likely to consider how their every choice and activity is being algorithmically scrutinised in order to determine what virtual goods they might actually buy. As an instance of what is widely being called ‘big data’, the data miing operations of Facebook, Zynga and similar services lead to a range of ethical questions (boyd and Crawford). While users may have ostensibly agreed to this data mining after clicking on Facebook’s Terms of Use agreement, the fact that almost no one reads these agreements when signing up for a service is the Internet’s worst kept secret. Similarly, the extension of these terms when Facebook operates as a platform for other applications is a far from transparent process. While examining the recording of user data leads to questions of privacy and surveillance, it is important to note that many users are often aware of the exchange to which they have agreed. Anders Albrechtslund deploys the term ‘social surveillance’ to usefully emphasise the knowing, playful and at times subversive approach some users take to the surveillance and data mining practices of online service providers. Similarly, E.J. Westlake notes that performances of self online are often not only knowing but deliberately false or misleading with the aim of exploiting the ways online activities are tracked. However, even users well aware of Facebook’s data mining on the site itself may be less informed about the social networking company’s mining of offsite activity. The introduction of ‘like’ buttons on many other Websites extends Facebook’s reach considerably. The various social plugins and ‘like’ buttons expand both active recording of user activity (where the like button is actually clicked) and passive data mining (since a cookie is installed or updated regardless of whether a button is actually pressed) (Gerlitz and Helmond). Indeed, because cookies – tiny packets of data exchanged and updated invisibly in browsers – assign each user a unique identifier, Facebook can either combine these data with an existing user’s profile or create profiles about non-users. If that person even joins Facebook, their account is connected with the existing, data-mined record of their Web activities (Roosendaal). As with Google, the significant issue here is not users knowingly sharing their data with Facebook, but the often complete lack of transparency in terms of the ways Facebook extracts and mines user data, both on Facebook itself and increasingly across applications using Facebook as a platform and across the Web through social plugins. Google after Death While data mining is clearly a core element in the operation of Facebook and Google, the ability to scrutinise the activities of users depends on those users being active; when someone dies, the question of the value and ownership of their digital assets becomes complicated, as does the way companies manage posthumous user information. For Google, the Gmail account of a deceased person becomes inactive; the stored email still takes up space on Google’s servers, but with no one using the account, no advertising is displayed and thus Google can earn no revenue from the account. However, the process of accessing the Gmail account of a deceased relative is an incredibly laborious one. In order to even begin the process, Google asks that someone physically mails a series of documents including a photocopy of a government-issued ID, the death certificate of the deceased person, evidence of an email the requester received from the deceased, along with other personal information. After Google have received and verified this information, they state that they might proceed to a second stage where further documents are required. Moreover, if at any stage Google decide that they cannot proceed in releasing a deceased relative’s Gmail account, they will not reveal their rationale. As their support documentation states: “because of our concerns for user privacy, if we determine that we cannot provide the Gmail content, we will not be able to share further details about the account or discuss our decision” (Google, “Accessing”). Thus, Google appears to enshrine the rights and privacy of individual users, even posthumously; the ownership or transfer of individual digital assets after death is neither a given, nor enshrined in Google’s policies. Yet, ironically, the economic value of that email to Google is likely zero, but the value of the email history of a loved one or business partner may be of substantial financial and emotional value, probably more so than when that person was alive. For those left behind, the value of email accounts as media, as a lasting record of social communication, is heightened. The question of how Google manages posthumous user data has been further complicated by the company’s March 2012 rationalisation of over seventy separate privacy policies for various tools and services they operate under the umbrella of a single privacy policy accessed using a single unified Google account. While this move was ostensibly to make privacy more understandable and transparent at Google, it had other impacts. For example, one of the side effects of a singular privacy policy and single Google identity is that deleting one of a recently deceased person’s services may inadvertently delete them all. Given that Google’s services include Gmail, YouTube and Picasa, this means that deleting an email account inadvertently erases all of the Google-hosted videos and photographs that individual posted during their lifetime. As Google warns, for example: “if you delete the Google Account to which your YouTube account is linked, you will delete both the Google Account AND your YouTube account, including all videos and account data” (Google, “What Happens”). A relative having gained access to a deceased person’s Gmail might sensibly delete the email account once the desired information is exported. However, it seems less likely that this executor would realise that in doing so all of the private and public videos that person had posted on YouTube would also permanently disappear. While material possessions can be carefully dispersed to specific individuals following the instructions in someone’s will, such affordances are not yet available for Google users. While it is entirely understandable that the ramification of policy changes are aimed at living users, as more and more online users pass away, the question of their digital assets becomes increasingly important. Google, for example, might allow a deceased person’s executor to elect which of their Google services should be kept online (perhaps their YouTube videos), which traces can be exported (perhaps their email), and which services can be deleted. At present, the lack of fine-grained controls over a user’s digital estate at Google makes this almost impossible. While it violates Google’s policies to transfer ownership of an account to another person, if someone does leave their passwords behind, this provides their loved ones with the best options in managing their digital legacy with Google. When someone dies and their online legacy is a collection of media fragments, the value of those media is far more apparent to the loved ones left behind rather than the companies housing those media. Facebook Memorialisation In response to users complaining that Facebook was suggesting they reconnect with deceased friends who had left Facebook profiles behind, in 2009 the company instituted an official policy of turning the Facebook profiles of departed users into memorial pages (Kelly). Technically, loved ones can choose between memorialisation and erasing an account altogether, but memorialisation is the default. This entails setting the account so that no one can log into it, and that no new friends (connections) can be made. Existing friends can access the page in line with the user’s final privacy settings, meaning that most friends will be able to post on the memorialised profile to remember that person in various ways (Facebook). Memorialised profiles (now Timelines, after Facebook’s redesign) thus become potential mourning spaces for existing connections. Since memorialised pages cannot make new connections, public memorial pages are increasingly popular on Facebook, frequently set up after a high-profile death, often involving young people, accidents or murder. Recent studies suggest that both of these Facebook spaces are allowing new online forms of mourning to emerge (Marwick and Ellison; Carroll and Landry; Kern, Forman, and Gil-Egui), although public pages have the downside of potentially inappropriate commentary and outright trolling (Phillips). Given Facebook has over a billion registered users, estimates already suggest that the platform houses 30 million profiles of deceased people, and this number will, of course, continue to grow (Kaleem). For Facebook, while posthumous users do not generate data themselves, the fact that they were part of a network means that their connections may interact with a memorialised account, or memorial page, and this activity, like all Facebook activities, allows the platform to display advertising and further track user interactions. However, at present Facebook’s options – to memorialise or delete accounts of deceased people – are fairly blunt. Once Facebook is aware that a user has died, no one is allowed to edit that person’s Facebook account or Timeline, so Facebook literally offers an all (memorialisation) or nothing (deletion) option. Given that Facebook is essentially a platform for performing identities, it seems a little short-sighted that executors cannot clean up or otherwise edit the final, lasting profile of a deceased Facebook user. As social networking services and social media become more ingrained in contemporary mourning practices, it may be that Facebook will allow more fine-grained control, positioning a digital executor also as a posthumous curator, making the final decision about what does and does not get kept in the memorialisation process. Since Facebook is continually mining user activity, the popularity of mourning as an activity on Facebook will likely mean that more attention is paid to the question of digital legacies. While the user themselves can no longer be social, the social practices of mourning, and the recording of a user as a media entity highlights the fact that social media can be about interactions which in significant ways include deceased users. Digital Legacy Services While the largest online corporations have fairly blunt tools for addressing digital death, there are a number of new tools and niche services emerging in this area which are attempting to offer nuanced control over digital legacies. Legacy Locker, for example, offers to store the passwords to all of a user’s online services and accounts, from Facebook to Paypal, and to store important documents and other digital material. Users designate beneficiaries who will receive this information after the account holder passes away, and this is confirmed by preselected “verifiers” who can attest to the account holder’s death. Death Switch similarly provides the ability to store and send information to users after the account holder dies, but tests whether someone is alive by sending verification emails; fail to respond to several prompts and Death Switch will determine a user has died, or is incapacitated, and executes the user’s final instructions. Perpetu goes a step further and offers the same tools as Legacy Locker but also automates existing options from social media services, allowing users to specify, for example, that their Facebook, Twitter or Gmail data should be downloaded and this archive should be sent to a designated recipient when the Perpetu user dies. These tools attempt to provide a more complex array of choices in terms of managing a user’s digital legacy, providing similar choices to those currently available when addressing material possessions in a formal will. At a broader level, the growing demand for these services attests to the ongoing value of online accounts and social media traces after a user’s death. Bequeathing passwords may not strictly follow the Terms of Use of the online services in question, but it is extremely hard to track or intervene when a user has the legitimate password, even if used by someone else. More to the point, this finely-grained legacy management allows far more flexibility in the utilisation and curation of digital assets posthumously. In the process of signing up for one of these services, or digital legacy management more broadly, the ongoing value and longevity of social media traces becomes more obvious to both the user planning their estate and those who ultimately have to manage it. The Social Media Afterlife The value of social media beyond the grave is also evident in the range of services which allow users to communicate in some fashion after they have passed away. Dead Social, for example, allows users to schedule posthumous social media activity, including the posting of tweets, sending of email, Facebook messages, or the release of online photos and videos. The service relies on a trusted executor confirming someone’s death, and after that releases these final messages effectively from beyond the grave. If I Die is a similar service, which also has an integrated Facebook application which ensures a user’s final message is directly displayed on their Timeline. In a bizarre promotional campaign around a service called If I Die First, the company is promising that the first user of the service to pass away will have their posthumous message delivered to a huge online audience, via popular blogs and mainstream press coverage. While this is not likely to appeal to everyone, the notion of a popular posthumous performance of self further complicates that question of what social media can mean after death. Illustrating the value of social media legacies in a quite different but equally powerful way, the Lives On service purports to algorithmically learn how a person uses Twitter while they are live, and then continue to tweet in their name after death. Internet critic Evgeny Morozov argues that Lives On is part of a Silicon Valley ideology of ‘solutionism’ which casts every facet of society as a problem in need of a digital solution (Morozov). In this instance, Lives On provides some semblance of a solution to the problem of death. While far from defeating death, the very fact that it might be possible to produce any meaningful approximation of a living person’s social media after they die is powerful testimony to the value of data mining and the importance of recognising that value. While Lives On is an experimental service in its infancy, it is worth wondering what sort of posthumous approximation might be built using the robust data profiles held by Facebook or Google. If Google Now can extrapolate what a user wants to see without any additional input, how hard would it be to retool this service to post what a user would have wanted after their death? Could there, in effect, be a Google After(life)? Conclusion Users of social media services have differing levels of awareness regarding the exchange they are agreeing to when signing up for services provided by Google or Facebook, and often value the social affordances without necessarily considering the ongoing media they are creating. Online corporations, by contrast, recognise and harness the informatic traces users generate through complex data mining and analysis. However, the death of a social media user provides a moment of rupture which highlights the significant value of the media traces a user leaves behind. More to the point, the value of these media becomes most evident to those left behind precisely because that individual can no longer be social. While beginning to address the issue of posthumous user data, Google and Facebook both have very blunt tools; Google might offer executors access while Facebook provides the option of locking a deceased user’s account as a memorial or removing it altogether. Neither of these responses do justice to the value that these media traces hold for the living, but emerging digital legacy management tools are increasingly providing a richer set of options for digital executors. While the differences between material and digital assets provoke an array of legal, spiritual and moral issues, digital traces nevertheless clearly hold significant and demonstrable value. For social media users, the death of someone they know is often the moment where the media side of social media – their lasting, infinitely replicable nature – becomes more important, more visible, and casts the value of the social media accounts of the living in a new light. For the larger online corporations and service providers, the inevitable increase in deceased users will likely provoke more fine-grained controls and responses to the question of digital legacies and posthumous profiles. It is likely, too, that the increase in online social practices of mourning will open new spaces and arenas for those same corporate giants to analyse and data-mine. References Albrechtslund, Anders. “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance.” First Monday 13.3 (2008). 21 Apr. 2013 ‹http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2142/1949›. boyd, danah. “Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence.” Convergence 14.1 (2008): 13–20. ———, and Kate Crawford. “Critical Questions for Big Data.” Information, Communication & Society 15.5 (2012): 662–679. Carroll, Brian, and Katie Landry. “Logging On and Letting Out: Using Online Social Networks to Grieve and to Mourn.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30.5 (2010): 341–349. Doyle, Warwick, and Matthew Fraser. “Facebook, Surveillance and Power.” Facebook and Philosophy: What’s on Your Mind? Ed. D.E. Wittkower. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2010. 215–230. Facebook. “Deactivating, Deleting & Memorializing Accounts.” Facebook Help Center. 2013. 7 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.facebook.com/help/359046244166395/›. Gerlitz, Carolin, and Anne Helmond. “The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data-intensive Web.” New Media & Society (2013). Google. “Accessing a Deceased Person’s Mail.” 25 Jan. 2013. 21 Apr. 2013 ‹https://support.google.com/mail/answer/14300?hl=en›. ———. “What Happens to YouTube If I Delete My Google Account or Google+?” 8 Jan. 2013. 21 Apr. 2013 ‹http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=69961&rd=1›. Halavais, Alexander. Search Engine Society. Polity, 2008. Hof, Robert. “Facebook Makes It Easier to Target Ads Based on Your Shopping History.” Forbes 27 Feb. 2013. 1 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/02/27/facebook-makes-it-easier-to-target-ads-based-on-your-shopping-history/›. Kaleem, Jaweed. “Death on Facebook Now Common as ‘Dead Profiles’ Create Vast Virtual Cemetery.” Huffington Post. 7 Dec. 2012. 7 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/07/death-facebook-dead-profiles_n_2245397.html›. Kelly, Max. “Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook.” The Facebook Blog. 27 Oct. 2009. 7 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.facebook.com/blog/blog.php?post=163091042130›. Kern, Rebecca, Abbe E. Forman, and Gisela Gil-Egui. “R.I.P.: Remain in Perpetuity. Facebook Memorial Pages.” Telematics and Informatics 30.1 (2012): 2–10. Marwick, Alice, and Nicole B. Ellison. “‘There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!’ Negotiating Visibility on Facebook Memorial Pages.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56.3 (2012): 378–400. Morozov, Evgeny. “The Perils of Perfection.” The New York Times 2 Mar. 2013. 4 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/the-perils-of-perfection.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0›. Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. London: Viking, 2011. Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday 16.12 (2011). 21 Apr. 2013 ‹http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3168›. Roosendaal, Arnold. “We Are All Connected to Facebook … by Facebook!” European Data Protection: In Good Health? Ed. Serge Gutwirth et al. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012. 3–19. Rudin, Ken. “Actionable Analytics at Zynga: Leveraging Big Data to Make Online Games More Fun and Social.” San Diego, CA, 2010. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything. 1st ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Westlake, E.J. “Friend Me If You Facebook: Generation Y and Performative Surveillance.” TDR: The Drama Review 52.4 (2008): 21–40. Zimmer, Michael. “The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats When the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine Meets Web 2.0.” First Monday 13.3 (2008). 21 Apr. 2013 ‹http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2136/1944›. ———. “The Gaze of the Perfect Search Engine: Google as an Infrastructure of Dataveillance.” Web Search. Eds. Amanda Spink & Michael Zimmer. Berlin: Springer, 2008. 77–99.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Lists and Social MediaLists have long been an ordering mechanism for computer-mediated social interaction. While far from being the first such mechanism, blogrolls offered an opportunity for bloggers to provide a list of their peers; the present generation of social media environments similarly provide lists of friends and followers. Where blogrolls and other earlier lists may have been user-generated, the social media lists of today are more likely to have been produced by the platforms themselves, and are of intrinsic value to the platform providers at least as much as to the users themselves; both Facebook and Twitter have highlighted the importance of their respective “social graphs” (their databases of user connections) as fundamental elements of their fledgling business models. This represents what Mejias describes as “nodocentrism,” which “renders all human interaction in terms of network dynamics (not just any network, but a digital network with a profit-driven infrastructure).”The communicative content of social media spaces is also frequently rendered in the form of lists. Famously, blogs are defined in the first place by their reverse-chronological listing of posts (Walker Rettberg), but the same is true for current social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms are inherently centred around an infinite, constantly updated and extended list of posts made by individual users and their connections.The concept of the list implies a certain degree of order, and the orderliness of content lists as provided through the latest generation of centralised social media platforms has also led to the development of more comprehensive and powerful, commercial as well as scholarly, research approaches to the study of social media. Using the example of Twitter, this article discusses the challenges of such “big data” research as it draws on the content lists provided by proprietary social media platforms.Twitter Archives for ResearchTwitter is a particularly useful source of social media data: using the Twitter API (the Application Programming Interface, which provides structured access to communication data in standardised formats) it is possible, with a little effort and sufficient technical resources, for researchers to gather very large archives of public tweets concerned with a particular topic, theme or event. Essentially, the API delivers very long lists of hundreds, thousands, or millions of tweets, and metadata about those tweets; such data can then be sliced, diced and visualised in a wide range of ways, in order to understand the dynamics of social media communication. Such research is frequently oriented around pre-existing research questions, but is typically conducted at unprecedented scale. The projects of media and communication researchers such as Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, Wood and Baughman, or Lotan, et al.—to name just a handful of recent examples—rely fundamentally on Twitter datasets which now routinely comprise millions of tweets and associated metadata, collected according to a wide range of criteria. What is common to all such cases, however, is the need to make new methodological choices in the processing and analysis of such large datasets on mediated social interaction.Our own work is broadly concerned with understanding the role of social media in the contemporary media ecology, with a focus on the formation and dynamics of interest- and issues-based publics. We have mined and analysed large archives of Twitter data to understand contemporary crisis communication (Bruns et al), the role of social media in elections (Burgess and Bruns), and the nature of contemporary audience engagement with television entertainment and news media (Harrington, Highfield, and Bruns). Using a custom installation of the open source Twitter archiving tool yourTwapperkeeper, we capture and archive all the available tweets (and their associated metadata) containing a specified keyword (like “Olympics” or “dubstep”), name (Gillard, Bieber, Obama) or hashtag (#ausvotes, #royalwedding, #qldfloods). In their simplest form, such Twitter archives are commonly stored as delimited (e.g. comma- or tab-separated) text files, with each of the following values in a separate column: text: contents of the tweet itself, in 140 characters or less to_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet recipient (for @replies) from_user: screen name of the tweet sender id: numerical ID of the tweet itself from_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet sender iso_language_code: code (e.g. en, de, fr, ...) of the sender’s default language source: client software used to tweet (e.g. Web, Tweetdeck, ...) profile_image_url: URL of the tweet sender’s profile picture geo_type: format of the sender’s geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_0: first element of the geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_1: second element of the geographical coordinates created_at: tweet timestamp in human-readable format time: tweet timestamp as a numerical Unix timestampIn order to process the data, we typically run a number of our own scripts (written in the programming language Gawk) which manipulate or filter the records in various ways, and apply a series of temporal, qualitative and categorical metrics to the data, enabling us to discern patterns of activity over time, as well as to identify topics and themes, key actors, and the relations among them; in some circ*mstances we may also undertake further processes of filtering and close textual analysis of the content of the tweets. Network analysis (of the relationships among actors in a discussion; or among key themes) is undertaken using the open source application Gephi. While a detailed methodological discussion is beyond the scope of this article, further details and examples of our methods and tools for data analysis and visualisation, including copies of our Gawk scripts, are available on our comprehensive project website, Mapping Online Publics.In this article, we reflect on the technical, epistemological and political challenges of such uses of large-scale Twitter archives within media and communication studies research, positioning this work in the context of the phenomenon that Lev Manovich has called “big social data.” In doing so, we recognise that our empirical work on Twitter is concerned with a complex research site that is itself shaped by a complex range of human and non-human actors, within a dynamic, indeed volatile media ecology (Fuller), and using data collection and analysis methods that are in themselves deeply embedded in this ecology. “Big Social Data”As Manovich’s term implies, the Big Data paradigm has recently arrived in media, communication and cultural studies—significantly later than it did in the hard sciences, in more traditionally computational branches of social science, and perhaps even in the first wave of digital humanities research (which largely applied computational methods to pre-existing, historical “big data” corpora)—and this shift has been provoked in large part by the dramatic quantitative growth and apparently increased cultural importance of social media—hence, “big social data.” As Manovich puts it: For the first time, we can follow [the] imaginations, opinions, ideas, and feelings of hundreds of millions of people. We can see the images and the videos they create and comment on, monitor the conversations they are engaged in, read their blog posts and tweets, navigate their maps, listen to their track lists, and follow their trajectories in physical space. (Manovich 461) This moment has arrived in media, communication and cultural studies because of the increased scale of social media participation and the textual traces that this participation leaves behind—allowing researchers, equipped with digital tools and methods, to “study social and cultural processes and dynamics in new ways” (Manovich 461). However, and crucially for our purposes in this article, many of these scholarly possibilities would remain latent if it were not for the widespread availability of Open APIs for social software (including social media) platforms. APIs are technical specifications of how one software application should access another, thereby allowing the embedding or cross-publishing of social content across Websites (so that your tweets can appear in your Facebook timeline, for example), or allowing third-party developers to build additional applications on social media platforms (like the Twitter user ranking service Klout), while also allowing platform owners to impose de facto regulation on such third-party uses via the same code. While platform providers do not necessarily have scholarship in mind, the data access affordances of APIs are also available for research purposes. As Manovich notes, until very recently almost all truly “big data” approaches to social media research had been undertaken by computer scientists (464). But as part of a broader “computational turn” in the digital humanities (Berry), and because of the increased availability to non-specialists of data access and analysis tools, media, communication and cultural studies scholars are beginning to catch up. Many of the new, large-scale research projects examining the societal uses and impacts of social media—including our own—which have been initiated by various media, communication, and cultural studies research leaders around the world have begun their work by taking stock of, and often substantially extending through new development, the range of available tools and methods for data analysis. The research infrastructure developed by such projects, therefore, now reflects their own disciplinary backgrounds at least as much as it does the fundamental principles of computer science. In turn, such new and often experimental tools and methods necessarily also provoke new epistemological and methodological challenges. The Twitter API and Twitter ArchivesThe Open API was a key aspect of mid-2000s ideas about the value of the open Web and “Web 2.0” business models (O’Reilly), emphasising the open, cross-platform sharing of content as well as promoting innovation at the margins via third-party application development—and it was in this ideological environment that the microblogging service Twitter launched and experienced rapid growth in popularity among users and developers alike. As José van Dijck cogently argues, however, a complex interplay of technical, economic and social dynamics has seen Twitter shift from a relatively open, ad hoc and user-centred platform toward a more formalised media business: For Twitter, the shift from being primarily a conversational communication tool to being a global, ad-supported followers tool took place in a relatively short time span. This shift did not simply result from the owner’s choice for a distinct business model or from the company’s decision to change hardware features. Instead, the proliferation of Twitter as a tool has been a complex process in which technological adjustments are intricately intertwined with changes in user base, transformations of content and choices for revenue models. (van Dijck 343)The specifications of Twitter’s API, as well as the written guidelines for its use by developers (Twitter, “Developer Rules”) are an excellent example of these “technological adjustments” and the ways they are deeply interwined with Twitter’s search for a viable revenue model. These changes show how the apparent semantic openness or “interpretive flexibility” of the term “platform” allows its meaning to be reshaped over time as the business models of platform owners change (Gillespie).The release of the API was first announced on the Twitter blog in September 2006 (Stone), not long after the service’s launch but after some popular third-party applications (like a mashup of Twitter with Google Maps creating a dynamic display of recently posted tweets around the world) had already been developed. Since then Twitter has seen a flourishing of what the company itself referred to as the “Twitter ecosystem” (Twitter, “Developer Rules”), including third-party developed client software (like Twitterific and TweetDeck), institutional use cases (such as large-scale social media visualisations of the London Riots in The Guardian), and parasitic business models (including social media metrics services like HootSuite and Klout).While the history of Twitter’s API rules and related regulatory instruments (such as its Developer Rules of the Road and Terms of Use) has many twists and turns, there have been two particularly important recent controversies around data access and control. First, the company locked out developers and researchers from direct “firehose” (very high volume) access to the Twitter feed; this was accompanied by a crackdown on free and public Twitter archiving services like 140Kit and the Web version of Twapperkeeper (Sample), and coincided with the establishment of what was at the time a monopoly content licensing arrangement between Twitter and Gnip, a company which charges commercial rates for high-volume API access to tweets (and content from other social media platforms). A second wave of controversy among the developer community occurred in August 2012 in response to Twitter’s release of its latest API rules (Sippey), which introduce further, significant limits to API use and usability in certain circ*mstances. In essence, the result of these changes to the Twitter API rules, announced without meaningful consultation with the developer community which created the Twitter ecosystem, is a forced rebalancing of development activities: on the one hand, Twitter is explicitly seeking to “limit” (Sippey) the further development of API-based third-party tools which support “consumer engagement activities” (such as end-user clients), in order to boost the use of its own end-user interfaces; on the other hand, it aims to “encourage” the further development of “consumer analytics” and “business analytics” as well as “business engagement” tools. Implicit in these changes is a repositioning of Twitter users (increasingly as content consumers rather than active communicators), but also of commercial and academic researchers investigating the uses of Twitter (as providing a narrow range of existing Twitter “analytics” rather than engaging in a more comprehensive investigation both of how Twitter is used, and of how such uses continue to evolve). The changes represent an attempt by the company to cement a certain, commercially viable and valuable, vision of how Twitter should be used (and analysed), and to prevent or at least delay further evolution beyond this desired stage. Although such attempts to “freeze” development may well be in vain, given the considerable, documented role which the Twitter user base has historically played in exploring new and unforeseen uses of Twitter (Bruns), it undermines scholarly research efforts to examine actual Twitter uses at least temporarily—meaning that researchers are increasingly forced to invest time and resources in finding workarounds for the new restrictions imposed by the Twitter API.Technical, Political, and Epistemological IssuesIn their recent article “Critical Questions for Big Data,” danah boyd and Kate Crawford have drawn our attention to the limitations, politics and ethics of big data approaches in the social sciences more broadly, but also touching on social media as a particularly prevalent site of social datamining. In response, we offer the following complementary points specifically related to data-driven Twitter research relying on archives of tweets gathered using the Twitter API.First, somewhat differently from most digital humanities (where researchers often begin with a large pre-existing textual corpus), in the case of Twitter research we have no access to an original set of texts—we can access only what Twitter’s proprietary and frequently changing API will provide. The tools Twitter researchers use rely on various combinations of parts of the Twitter API—or, more accurately, the various Twitter APIs (particularly the Search and Streaming APIs). As discussed above, of course, in providing an API, Twitter is driven not by scholarly concerns but by an attempt to serve a range of potentially value-generating end-users—particularly those with whom Twitter can create business-to-business relationships, as in their recent exclusive partnership with NBC in covering the 2012 London Olympics.The following section from Twitter’s own developer FAQ highlights the potential conflicts between the business-case usage scenarios under which the APIs are provided and the actual uses to which they are often put by academic researchers or other dataminers:Twitter’s search is optimized to serve relevant tweets to end-users in response to direct, non-recurring queries such as #hashtags, URLs, domains, and keywords. The Search API (which also powers Twitter’s search widget) is an interface to this search engine. Our search service is not meant to be an exhaustive archive of public tweets and not all tweets are indexed or returned. Some results are refined to better combat spam and increase relevance. Due to capacity constraints, the index currently only covers about a week’s worth of tweets. (Twitter, “Frequently Asked Questions”)Because external researchers do not have access to the full, “raw” data, against which we could compare the retrieved archives which we use in our later analyses, and because our data access regimes rely so heavily on Twitter’s APIs—each with its technical quirks and limitations—it is impossible for us to say with any certainty that we are capturing a complete archive or even a “representative” sample (whatever “representative” might mean in a data-driven, textualist paradigm). In other words, the “lists” of tweets delivered to us on the basis of a keyword search are not necessarily complete; and there is no way of knowing how incomplete they are. The total yield of even the most robust capture system (using the Streaming API and not relying only on Search) depends on a number of variables: rate limiting, the filtering and spam-limiting functions of Twitter’s search algorithm, server outages and so on; further, because Twitter prohibits the sharing of data sets it is difficult to compare notes with other research teams.In terms of epistemology, too, the primary reliance on large datasets produces a new mode of scholarship in media, communication and cultural studies: what emerges is a form of data-driven research which tends towards abductive reasoning; in doing so, it highlights tensions between the traditional research questions in discourse or text-based disciplines like media and communication studies, and the assumptions and modes of pattern recognition that are required when working from the “inside out” of a corpus, rather than from the outside in (for an extended discussion of these epistemological issues in the digital humanities more generally, see Dixon).Finally, even the heuristics of our analyses of Twitter datasets are mediated by the API: the datapoints that are hardwired into the data naturally become the most salient, further shaping the type of analysis that can be done. For example, a common process in our research is to use the syntax of tweets to categorise it as one of the following types of activity: original tweets: tweets which are neither @reply nor retweetretweets: tweets which contain RT @user… (or similar) unedited retweets: retweets which start with RT @user… edited retweets: retweets do not start with RT @user…genuine @replies: tweets which contain @user, but are not retweetsURL sharing: tweets which contain URLs(Retweets which are made using the Twitter “retweet button,” resulting in verbatim passing-along without the RT @user syntax or an opportunity to add further comment during the retweet process, form yet another category, which cannot be tracked particularly effectively using the Twitter API.)These categories are driven by the textual and technical markers of specific kinds of interactions that are built into the syntax of Twitter itself (@replies or @mentions, RTs); and specific modes of referentiality (URLs). All of them focus on (and thereby tend to privilege) more informational modes of communication, rather than the ephemeral, affective, or ambiently intimate uses of Twitter that can be illuminated more easily using ethnographic approaches: approaches that can actually focus on the individual user, their social contexts, and the broader cultural context of the traces they leave on Twitter. ConclusionsIn this article we have described and reflected on some of the sociotechnical, political and economic aspects of the lists of tweets—the structured Twitter data upon which our research relies—which may be gathered using the Twitter API. As we have argued elsewhere (Bruns and Burgess)—and, hopefully, have begun to demonstrate in this paper—media and communication studies scholars who are actually engaged in using computational methods are well-positioned to contribute to both the methodological advances we highlight at the beginning of this paper and the political debates around computational methods in the “big social data” moment on which the discussion in the second part of the paper focusses. One pressing issue in the area of methodology is to build on current advances to bring together large-scale datamining approaches with ethnographic and other qualitative approaches, especially including close textual analysis. More broadly, in engaging with the “big social data” moment there is a pressing need for the development of code literacy in media, communication and cultural studies. In the first place, such literacy has important instrumental uses: as Manovich argues, much big data research in the humanities requires costly and time-consuming (and sometimes alienating) partnerships with technical experts (typically, computer scientists), because the free tools available to non-programmers are still limited in utility in comparison to what can be achieved using raw data and original code (Manovich, 472).But code literacy is also a requirement of scholarly rigour in the context of what David Berry calls the “computational turn,” representing a “third wave” of Digital Humanities. Berry suggests code and software might increasingly become in themselves objects of, and not only tools for, research: I suggest that we introduce a humanistic approach to the subject of computer code, paying attention to the wider aspects of code and software, and connecting them to the materiality of this growing digital world. With this in mind, the question of code becomes increasingly important for understanding in the digital humanities, and serves as a condition of possibility for the many new computational forms that mediate our experience of contemporary culture and society. (Berry 17)A first step here lies in developing a more robust working knowledge of the conceptual models and methodological priorities assumed by the workings of both the tools and the sources we use for “big social data” research. Understanding how something like the Twitter API mediates the cultures of use of the platform, as well as reflexively engaging with its mediating role in data-driven Twitter research, promotes a much more materialist critical understanding of the politics of the social media platforms (Gillespie) that are now such powerful actors in the media ecology. ReferencesBerry, David M. “Introduction: Understanding Digital Humanities.” Understanding Digital Humanities. Ed. David M. Berry. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 1-20.boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. “Critical Questions for Big Data.” Information, Communication & Society 15.5 (2012): 662-79.Bruns, Axel. “Ad Hoc Innovation by Users of Social Networks: The Case of Twitter.” ZSI Discussion Paper 16 (2012). 18 Sep. 2012 ‹https://www.zsi.at/object/publication/2186›.Bruns, Axel, and Jean Burgess. “Notes towards the Scientific Study of Public Communication on Twitter.” Keynote presented at the Conference on Science and the Internet, Düsseldorf, 4 Aug. 2012. 18 Sep. 2012 http://snurb.info/files/2012/Notes%20towards%20the%20Scientific%20Study%20of%20Public%20Communication%20on%20Twitter.pdfBruns, Axel, Jean Burgess, Kate Crawford, and Frances Shaw. “#qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods.” Brisbane: ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, 2012. 18 Sep. 2012 ‹http://cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf›Burgess, Jean E. & Bruns, Axel (2012) “(Not) the Twitter Election: The Dynamics of the #ausvotes Conversation in Relation to the Australian Media Ecology.” Journalism Practice 6.3 (2012): 384-402Dixon, Dan. “Analysis Tool Or Research Methodology: Is There an Epistemology for Patterns?” Understanding Digital Humanities. Ed. David M. Berry. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 191-209.Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2005.Gillespie, Tarleton. “The Politics of ‘Platforms’.” New Media & Society 12.3 (2010): 347-64.Harrington, Stephen, Highfield, Timothy J., & Bruns, Axel (2012) “More than a Backchannel: Twitter and Television.” Ed. José Manuel Noguera. Audience Interactivity and Participation. COST Action ISO906 Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies, Brussels, Belgium, pp. 13-17. 18 Sept. 2012 http://www.cost-transforming-audiences.eu/system/files/essays-and-interview-essays-18-06-12.pdfLotan, Gilad, Erhardt Graeff, Mike Ananny, Devin Gaffney, Ian Pearce, and danah boyd. “The Arab Spring: The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions.” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1375-1405. 18 Sep. 2012 ‹http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1246/613›.Manovich, Lev. “Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data.” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. 460-75.Mejias, Ulises A. “Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond.” Fibreculture Journal 20 (2012). 18 Sep. 2012 ‹http://twenty.fibreculturejournal.org/2012/06/20/fcj-147-liberation-technology-and-the-arab-spring-from-utopia-to-atopia-and-beyond/›.O’Reilly, Tim. “What is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.” O’Reilly Network 30 Sep. 2005. 18 Sep. 2012 ‹http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html›.Papacharissi, Zizi, and Maria de Fatima Oliveira. “Affective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt.” Journal of Communication 62.2 (2012): 266-82.Sample, Mark. “The End of Twapperkeeper (and What to Do about It).” ProfHacker. The Chronicle of Higher Education 8 Mar. 2011. 18 Sep. 2012 ‹http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/the-end-of-twapperkeeper-and-what-to-do-about-it/31582›.Sippey, Michael. “Changes Coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API.” 16 Aug. 2012. Twitter Developers Blog. 18 Sep. 2012 ‹https://dev.Twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-Twitter-api›.Stone, Biz. “Introducing the Twitter API.” Twitter Blog 20 Sep. 2006. 18 Sep. 2012 ‹http://blog.Twitter.com/2006/09/introducing-Twitter-api.html›.Twitter. “Developer Rules of the Road.” Twitter Developers Website 17 May 2012. 18 Sep. 2012 ‹https://dev.Twitter.com/terms/api-terms›.Twitter. “Frequently Asked Questions.” 18 Sep. 2012 ‹https://dev.twitter.com/docs/faq›.Van Dijck, José. “Tracing Twitter: The Rise of a Microblogging Platform.” International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 7.3 (2011): 333-48.Walker Rettberg, Jill. Blogging. Cambridge: Polity, 2008.Wood, Megan M., and Linda Baughman. “Glee Fandom and Twitter: Something New, or More of the Same Old Thing?” Communication Studies 63.3 (2012): 328-44.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

When I saw the word ‘bubbles’ my immediate thought went to the painting by John Millais of a child blowing bubbles that subsequently became part of the advertising campaign for Pears soap. Bubbles blown by children, as we all once did, last but a few seconds and lead on naturally to the theme of transience and constant change. Nothing lasts forever, even if human beings make attempts to impose permanence on the world. A child’s disappointment at having a soap bubble burst represents a deep human desire for permanence which is the focus of this article. Before the modern age, human life could be considered to be somewhat like a bubble in that it could be pricked at any time. This was especially the case with babies and young children who could be easily carried off. As Jeremy Taylor put it: but if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a child, of a careless nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents. (9) More generally, human beings understood that there was nothing permanent about their existing circ*mstances and that the possibility of famine, disease and, even war was ever present. Pax Romana, which is eulogised by Edward Gibbon as a felicitous time, did not suffer much in the way of war, famine, or epidemics but it was still a time when many Romans would have suffered from a range of diseases and not always have been well nourished. It was, however, a time of considerable security for most Romans who did not need to fear a band of marauders turning up on their doorstep. Disease and war would follow in the wake of climate change during the next century (Harper). Pax Romana was a bubble of relative tranquillity in human history. For a short period of time, climatic conditions, economic circ*mstances and political stability coalesced to still the winds of time temporarily. But such bubbles were unusual in the European context, which was usually riven by war. Peace reigned, by and large, in the long nineteenth century and in the period following World War II, to which it is possible to attach the name ‘pax moderna’. In China, much longer bubbles have been the norm, but they were succeeded by terrible periods of famine, dislocation, and war. The Ming bubble burst in the seventeenth century amidst a time of cold, famine, and plague (Parker 115-151). In such circ*mstances there was an appreciation of the precariousness of human existence. This had two major effects: A search for permanence in a world of change and uncertainty, a means of creating a bubble that can resist that change. When living in a time of relative stability, dealing with the fear that that stability will only last so long and that bad things may be just around the corner. These two matters form the basis of this article. Human beings create bubbles as they attempt to control change. They then become attached to their bubbles, even to the extent of believing that their bubbles are the real world. This has the effect of bubbles continuing to exist even if they harm human understanding of the world rather than enhancing it. Impermanence is the great reality of human existence; as Heracl*tus (Burnet 136) correctly stated, we cannot place our foot in the same river twice. The extraordinary thing is that human beings possess a plastic nature that allows them to adapt to that impermanence (Melleuish & Rizzo ‘Limits’). The plasticity of human beings, as expressed in their culture, can be seen most clearly in the way that human languages constantly change. This occurs both in terms of word usage and grammatical structure. English was once an inflected language but cases now only really survive in personal pronouns. Words constantly change their meanings, both over time and in different places. Words appear to take on the appearance of permanence; they appear to form bubbles that are encased in lead, even when the reality is that words form multiple fragile bubbles that are constantly being burst and remade. The changing nature of the meaning of words only becomes known to a literate society, in particular a literate society that has a genuine sense of history. In an oral society words are free to change over time and there is little sense of those changes. Writing has the effect of fixing texts into a particular form; at the very least it makes creative reworking of texts much more difficult. Of course, there are counter examples to such a claim, the most famous of which are the Vedas which, it is argued, remained unchanged despite centuries of oral transmission (Doniger104-7). This fixed nature could be achieved because of the strict mode of transmission, ensuring that the hymns did not change when transmitted. As the Vedas are linked to the performance of rituals this exactness was necessary for the rituals to be efficacious (Olivelle xli-xlv). The transmission of words is not the same thing as the transmission of meaning. Nor does it mean that many words that today are used as seemingly universal ideas have always existed. Religion (Nongeri), state (Melleuish, ‘State’), civilisation, and culture (Melleuish, ‘Civilisation’) are all modern creations; ‘identity’ is only about sixty years old (Stokes 2). New words emerge to deal with new circ*mstances. For example, civilisation came into being partially because the old term ‘Christendom’ had become redundant; ‘identity’ replaced an earlier idea of national character. Words, then, are bubbles that human beings cast out onto the world and that appear to create the appearance of permanence. These bubbles encase the real world giving the thing that they name ‘being’, even as that thing is in flux and a condition of becoming. For Parmenides (loc. 1355-1439), the true nature of the world is being. The solidity provided by ‘being’ is a comfort in a world that is constantly changing and in which there is a constant threat of change. Words and ideas do not form stable bubbles, they form a string of bubbles, with individuals constantly blowing out new versions of a word, but they appear as if they were just the one bubble. One can argue, quite correctly, I believe, that this tendency to meld a string of bubbles into a single bubble is central to the human condition and actually helps human beings to come to terms with their existence in the world. ‘Bubble as being’ provides human beings with a considerable capacity to gain a degree of control over their world. Amongst other things, it allows for radical simplification. A.R. Luria (20-47), in his study of the impact of literacy on how human beings think, noted that illiterate Uzbeks classified colour in a complex way but that with the coming of literacy came to accept the quite simple colour classifications of the modern world. Interestingly, Uzbeks have no word for orange; the ‘being’ of colours is a human creation. One would think that this desire for ‘being’, for a world that is composed of ‘constants’, is confined to the world of human culture, but that is not the case. Everyone learns at school that the speed of light is a constant. Rupert Sheldrake (92-3) decided to check the measurement of the speed of light and discovered that the empirical measurements taken of its speed actually varied. Constants give the universe a smooth regularity that it would otherwise lack. However, there are a number of problems that emerge from a too strong attachment to these bubbles of being. One is that the word is mistaken for the thing; the power of the word, the logos, becomes so great that it comes to be assumed that all the objects described by a word must fit into a single model or type. This flies in the face of two realities. One is that every example of a named object is different. Hence, when one does something practically in the world, such as construct a building, one must adjust one’s activities according to local circ*mstances. That the world is heterogeneous explains why human beings need plasticity. They need to adapt their practices as they encounter new and different circ*mstances. If they do not, it may be the case that they will die. The problem with the logos introduced by literacy, the bubble of being, is that it makes human beings less flexible in their dealings with the world. The other reality is human plasticity itself. As word/bubbles are being constantly generated then each bubble will vary in its particular meaning, both at the community and, even, individual, level. Over time words will vary subtly in meaning in different places. There is no agreed common meaning to any word; being is an illusion. Of course, it is possible for governments and other institutions to lay down what the ‘real’ meaning of a word is, much in the same way as the various forms of measurement are defined by certain scientific criteria. This becomes dangerous in the case of abstract nouns. It is the source of ‘heresy’ which is often defined in terms of the meaning of particular words. Multiple, almost infinite, bubbles must be amalgamated into one big bubble. Attempts by logos professionals to impose a single meaning are often resisted by ordinary human beings who generally seem to be quite happy living with a range of bubbles (Tannous; Pegg). One example of mutation of meaning is the word ‘liberal’, which means quite different things in America and Australia. To add to the confusion, there are occasions when liberal is used in Australia in its American sense. This simply illustrates the reality that liberal has no specific ‘being’, some universal idea of which individual liberals are particular manifestations. The problem becomes even worse when one moves between languages and cultures. To give but one example; the ancient Greek word πολις is translated as state but it can be argued that the Greek πολις was a stateless society (Berent). There are good arguments for taking a pragmatic attitude to these matters and assuming that there is a vague general agreement regarding what words such as ‘democracy’ mean, and not to go down the rabbit hole into the wonderland of infinite bubbles. This works so long as individuals understand that bubbles of being are provisional in nature and are capable of being pricked. It is possible, however, for the bubbles to harden and to impose on us what is best described as the ‘tyranny of concepts’, whereby the idea or word obscures the reality. This can occur because some words, especially abstract nouns, have very vague meanings: they can be seen as a sort of cloudy bubble. Again, democracy is good example of a cloudy bubble whose meaning is very difficult to define. A cloudy bubble prevents us from analysing and criticising something too closely. Bubbles exist because human beings desire permanence in a world of change and transience. In this sense, the propensity to create bubbles is as much an aspect of human nature as its capacity for plasticity. They are the product of a desire to ‘tame time’ and to create a feeling of security in a world of flux. As discussed above, a measure of security has not been a common state of affairs for much of human history, which is why the Pax Romana was so idealised. If there is modern ‘bubble’ created by the Enlightenment it is the dream of Kantian perpetual peace, that it is possible to bring a world into being that is marked by permanent peace, in which all the earlier horrors of human existence, from famine to epidemics to war can be tamed and humanity live harmoniously and peacefully forever. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to ‘tame’ history (Melleuish & Rizzo, ‘Philosophy’). This can be done through the idea of progress. History can be placed into a bubble of constant improvement whereby human beings are constantly getting better, not just materially but also intellectually and morally. Progress very easily turns into a utopian fantasy where people no longer suffer and can live forever. The horrors of the first half of the twentieth century did little to dent the power of this bubble. There is still an element of modern culture that dreams of such a world actually coming into being. Human beings may try to convince themselves that the bubble of progress will not burst and that perpetual peace may well be perpetual, but underlying that hope there are deep anxieties born of the knowledge that ‘nothing lasts forever’. Since 1945, the West has lived through a period of peace and relative prosperity, a pax moderna; the European Union is very much a Kantian creation. Underneath the surface, however, contemporary Western culture has a deep fear that the bubble can burst very easily and that the veneer of modern civilisation will be stripped away. This fear manifests itself in a number of ways. One can be seen in the regular articles that appear about the possibility of a comet or asteroid hitting the earth (Drake). Such a collision will eventually occur but it is sixty five million years since the dinosaurs became extinct. Another is the fear of solar storm that could destroy both electricity grids and electronic devices (Britt). Another expression of this fear can be found in forms of artistic expression, including zombie, disaster, and apocalypse movies. These reveal something about the psyche of modernity, and modern democracy, in the same way that Athenian tragedy expressed the hopes and fears of fifth-century Athenian democracy through its elaboration of the great Greek myths. Robert Musil remarks in The Man without Qualities (833) that if humanity dreamed collectively it would dream Moosbrugger, a serial murderer. Certainly, it appears to be the case that when the modern West dreams collectively it dreams of zombies, vampires, and a world in which civilised values have broken down and everyone lives in a Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all against all (Hobbes 86-100). This theme of the bursting of the ‘civilised bubble’ is a significant theme in contemporary culture. In popular culture, two of the best examples of this bursting are the television shows Battlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead. In Galactica, human beings fall prey to the vengeful artificial creatures that they have created and mistreated. In The Walking Dead, as in all post-apocalyptic Zombie creations, the great fear is that human beings will turn into zombies, creatures that have been granted a form of immortality but at the cost of the loss of their souls. The fear of death is primal in all human beings, as is the fear of the loss of one’s humanity after death. This fear is expressed in the first surviving work of human literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh goes unsuccessfully in search of immortal life. In perhaps the bleakest modern portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, we encounter the ultimate Hobbesian universe. This is a world that has undergone an apocalypse of unknown origin. There is only darkness and dust and ash; nothing grows any longer and the few survivors are left to scavenge for the food left behind in tins. Or they can eat each other. It is the ultimate war of all against all. The clipped language, the lack of identity of the inhabitants, leads us into something that is almost no longer human. There is little or no hope. Reading The Road one is drawn back to the ‘House of Darkness’ described in The Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes the afterlife in terms of dust (“The Great Myths”): He bound my arms like the wings of a bird, to lead me captive to the house of darkness, seat of Irkalla:to the house which none who enters ever leaves, on the path that allows no journey back, to the house whose residents are deprived of light, where soil is itself their sustenance and clay their food,where they are clad like birds in coats of feathers, and see no light, but dwell in darkness. The Road is a profoundly depressing work, and the movie is barely watchable. In bursting the bubble of immortality, it plays on human fears and anxieties that stretch back millennia. The really interesting question is why such fears should emerge at a time when people in countries like America are living through a period of peace and prosperity. Much as people dream of a bubble of infinite progress and perpetual peace, they instinctively understand that that particular bubble is very fragile and may very easily be punctured. My final example is the less than well-known movie Zardoz, dating from the 1970s and starring Sean Connery. In it, some human beings have achieved ‘immortality’ but the consequences are less than perfect, and the Sean Connery character has the task, given to him by nature, to restore the balance between life and death, just as Gilgamesh had to understand that the two went together. There are some bubbles that are meant to be burst, some realities that human beings have to face if they are to appreciate their place in the scheme of things. Hence, we face a paradox. Human beings are constantly producing bubbles as they chart their way through a world that is also always changing. This is a consequence of their plastic nature. For good reasons, largely out of a desire for stability and security, they also tend to bring these infinite bubbles together into a much smaller number of bubbles that they view as possessing being and hence permanence. The problem is that these ‘bubbles of being’ are treated as if they really described the world in some sort of universal fashion, rather than treated as useful tools. Human beings can become the victims of their own creations. At the same time, human beings have an instinctive appreciation that the world is not stable and fixed, and this appreciation finds its expression in the products of their imagination. They burst bubbles through the use of their imagination in response to their fears and anxieties. Bubbles are the product of the interaction between the changing nature of both the world and human beings and the desire of those human beings for a degree of stability. Human beings need to appreciate both the reality of change and the strengths and weaknesses of bubbles as they navigate their way through the world. References Berent, M. “Stasis, or the Greek Invention of Politics.” History of Political Thought XIX.3 (1998). Britt, R.R. “150 Years Ago: The Worst Solar Storm Ever.” Space.com, 2 Sep. 2009. <https://www.space.com/7224-150-years-worst-solar-storm.html>. Burnet, J. Early Greek Philosophy. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1892. Doniger, W. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Drake, N. “Why NASA Plans to Slam a Spacecraft into an Asteroid.” National Geographic, 28 Apr. 2020. <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/giant-asteroid-nasa-dart-deflection/>. Gibbons, E. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Vol. 1. New York: Harper, 1836. <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25717/25717-h/25717-h.htm#chap02.1>. “The Great Myths #6: Enkidu in the Underworld.” <https://wordandsilence.com/2017/11/30/6-enkidu-in-the-underworld-mesopotamian/>. Harper, K. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the End of an Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Hobbes, T. Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Kant I. “Perpetual Peace.” In Political Writings, ed. H.S. Reiss. Trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 93-130. Luria, A.R. Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations. Trans. M. Lopez-Morillas and L. Solotaroff. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976. McCarthy, C. The Road. London: Picador, 2006. Melleuish, G.. “The State in World History: Perspectives and Problems.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 48.3 (2002): 322–336. ———. “Civilisation, Culture and Police.” Arts 20 (1998): 7–25. Melleuish, G., and S. Rizzo. “Limits of Naturalism: Plasticity, Finitude and the Imagination.” Cosmos & History 11.1 (2015): 221-238. Melleuish, G., and S.G. Rizzo. “Philosophy of History: Change, Stability and the Tragic Human Condition.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 13.3 (2017): 292-311. Musil, Robert. The Man without Qualities. Vol. 2. Trans. Sophie Wilkins. New York: Vintage International, 1996. Nongeri, B. Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. Olivelle, P. Introduction. Upanisads. Trans. Patrick Olivelle. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Parker, G. Global Crisis: War, Climate & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale, 2013. Parmenides. Fragments: A Text and Translation with an Introduction by David Gallop. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984. Kindle edition. Pegg, M.G. A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Sheldrake, Rupert. The Science Illusion. London: Coronet: 2013. Stokes, G. Introduction. In The Politics of Identity in Australia, ed. Geoffrey Stokes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Tannous, J. The Making of the Medieval Middle East. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2019. Taylor, J. Holy Dying. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2000.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Permaculture is a creative design process that is based on ethics and design principles. It guides us to mimic the patterns and relationships we can find in nature and can be applied to all aspects of human habitation, from agriculture to ecological building, from appropriate technology to education and even economics. (permacultureprinciples.com)This paper considers permaculture as an example of counterculture in Australia. Permaculture is a neologism, the result of a contraction of ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’. In accordance with David Holmgren and Richard Telford definition quoted above, we intend permaculture as a design process based on a set of ethical and design principles. Rather than describing the history of permaculture, we choose two moments as paradigmatic of its evolution in relation to counterculture.The first moment is permaculture’s beginnings steeped in the same late 1960s turbulence that saw some people pursue an alternative lifestyle in Northern NSW and a rural idyll in Tasmania (Grayson and Payne). Ideas of a return to the land circulating in this first moment coalesced around the publication in 1978 of the book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, which functioned as “a disruptive technology, an idea that threatened to disrupt business as usual, to change the way we thought and did things”, as Russ Grayson writes in his contextual history of permaculture. The second moment is best exemplified by the definitions of permaculture as “a holistic system of design … most often applied to basic human needs such as water, food and shelter … also used to design more abstract systems such as community and economic structures” (Milkwood) and as “also a world wide network and movement of individuals and groups working in both rich and poor countries on all continents” (Holmgren).We argue that the shift in understanding of permaculture from the “back to the land movement” (Grayson) as a more wholesome alternative to consumer society to the contemporary conceptualisation of permaculture as an assemblage and global network of practices, is representative of the shifting dynamic between dominant paradigms and counterculture from the 1970s to the present. While counterculture was a useful way to understand the agency of subcultures (i.e. by countering mainstream culture and society) contemporary forms of globalised capitalism demand different models and vocabularies within which the idea of “counter” as clear cut alternative becomes an awkward fit.On the contrary we see the emergence of a repertoire of practices aimed at small-scale, localised solutions connected in transnational networks (Pink 105). These practices operate contrapuntally, a concept we borrow from Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), to define how divergent practices play off each other while remaining at the edge, but still in a relation of interdependence with a dominant paradigm. In Said’s terms “contrapuntal reading” reveals what is left at the periphery of a mainstream narrative, but is at the same time instrumental to the development of events in the narrative itself. To illustrate this concept Said makes the case of novels where colonial plantations at the edge of the Empire make possible a certain lifestyle in England, but don’t appear in the narrative of that lifestyle itself (66-67).In keeping with permaculture design ecological principles, we argue that today permaculture is best understood as part of an assemblage of design objects, bacteria, economies, humans, plants, technologies, actions, theories, mushrooms, policies, affects, desires, animals, business, material and immaterial labour and politics and that it can be read as contrapuntal rather than as oppositional practice. Contrapuntal insofar as it is not directly oppositional preferring to reframe and reorientate everyday practices. The paper is structured in three parts: in the first one we frame our argument by providing a background to our understanding of counterculture and assemblage; in the second we introduce the beginning of permaculture in its historical context, and in third we propose to consider permaculture as an assemblage.Background: Counterculture and Assemblage We do not have the scope in this article to engage with contested definitions of counterculture in the Australian context, or their relation to contraculture or subculture. There is an emerging literature (Stickells, Robinson) touched on elsewhere in this issue. In this paper we view counterculture as social movements that “undermine societal hierarchies which structure urban life and create, instead a city organised on the basis of values such as action, local cultures, and decentred, participatory democracy” (Castells 19-20). Our focus on cities demonstrates the ways counterculture has shifted away from oppositional protest and towards ways of living sustainably in an increasingly urbanised world.Permaculture resonates with Castells’s definition and with other forms of protest, or what Musgrove calls “the dialectics of utopia” (16), a dynamic tension of political activism (resistance) and personal growth (aesthetics and play) that characterised ‘counterculture’ in the 1970s. McKay offers a similar view when he says such acts of counterculture are capable of “both a utopian gesture and a practical display of resistance” (27). But as a design practice, permaculture goes beyond the spectacle of protest.In this sense permaculture can be understood as an everyday act of resistance: “The design act is not a boycott, strike, protest, demonstration, or some other political act, but lends its power of resistance from being precisely a designerly way of intervening into people’s lives” (Markussen 38). We view permaculture design as a form of design activism that is embedded in everyday life. It is a process that aims to reorient a practice not by disrupting it but by becoming part of it.Guy Julier cites permaculture, along with the appropriate technology movement and community architecture, as one of many examples of radical thinking in design that emerged in the 1970s (225). This alignment of permaculture as a design practice that is connected to counterculture in an assemblage, but not entirely defined by it, is important in understanding the endurance of permaculture as a form of activism.In refuting the common and generalized narrative of failure that is used to describe the sixties (and can be extended to the seventies), Julie Stephens raises the many ways that the dominant ethos of the time was “revolutionised by the radicalism of the period, but in ways that bore little resemblance to the announced intentions of activists and participants themselves” (121). Further, she argues that the “extraordinary and paradoxical aspects of the anti-disciplinary protest of the period were that while it worked to collapse the division between opposition and complicity and problematised received understandings of the political, at the same time it reaffirmed its commitment to political involvement as an emancipatory, collective endeavour” (126).Many foresaw the political challenge of counterculture. From the belly of the beast, in 1975, Craig McGregor wrote that countercultures are “a crucial part of conventional society; and eventually they will be judged on how successful they transform it” (43). In arguing that permaculture is an assemblage and global network of practices, we contribute to a description of the shifting dynamic between dominant paradigms and counterculture that was identified by McGregor at the time and Stephens retrospectively, and we open up possibilities for reexamining an important moment in the history of Australian protest movements.Permaculture: Historical Context Together with practical manuals and theoretical texts permaculture has produced its foundation myths, centred around two father figures, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. The pair, we read in accounts on the history of permaculture, met in the 1970s in Hobart at the University of Tasmania, where Mollison, after a polymath career, was a senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology, and Holmgren a student. Together they wrote the first article on permaculture in 1976 for the Organic Farmer and Gardener magazine (Grayson and Payne), which together with the dissemination of ideas via radio, captured the social imagination of the time. Two years later Holmgren and Mollison published the book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements (Mollison and Holmgren).These texts and Mollison’s talks articulated ideas and desires and most importantly proposed solutions about living on the land, and led to the creation of the first ecovillage in Australia, Max Lindegger’s Crystal Waters in South East Queensland, the first permaculture magazine (titled Permaculture), and the beginning of the permaculture network (Grayson and Payne). In 1979 Mollison taught the first permaculture course, and published the second book. Grayson and Payne stress how permaculture media practices, such as the radio interview mentioned above and publications like Permaculture Magazine and Permaculture International Journal were key factors in the spreading of the design system and building a global network.The ideas developed around the concept of permaculture were shaped by, and in turned contributed to shape, the social climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s that captured the discontent with both capitalism and the Cold War, and that coalesced in “alternative lifestyles groups” (Metcalf). In 1973, for instance, the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin was not only a countercultural landmark, but also the site of emergence of alternative experiments in living that found their embodiment in experimental housing design (Stickells). The same interest in technological innovation mixed with rural skills animated one of permaculture’s precursors, the “back to the land movement” and its attempt “to blend rural traditionalism and technological and ideological modernity” (Grayson).This character of remix remains one of the characteristics of permaculture. Unlike movements based mostly on escape from the mainstream, permaculture offered a repertoire, and a system of adaptable solutions to live both in the country and the city. Like many aspects of the “alternative lifestyle” counterculture, permaculture was and is intensely biopolitical in the sense that it is concerned with the management of life itself “from below”: one’s own, people’s life and life on planet earth more generally. This understanding of biopolitics as power of life rather than over life is translated in permaculture into malleable design processes across a range of diversified practices. These are at the basis of the endurance of permaculture beyond the experiments in alternative lifestyles.In distinguishing it from sustainability (a contested concept among permaculture practitioners, some of whom prefer the notion of “planning for abundance”), Barry sees permaculture as:locally based and robustly contextualized implementations of sustainability, based on the notion that there is no ‘one size fits all’ model of sustainability. Permaculture, though rightly wary of more mainstream, reformist, and ‘business as usual’ accounts of sustainability can be viewed as a particular localized, and resilience-based conceptualization of sustainable living and the creation of ‘sustainable communities’. (83)The adaptability of permaculture to diverse solutions is stressed by Molly Scott-Cato, who, following David Holmgren, defines it as follows: “Permaculture is not a set of rules; it is a process of design based around principles found in the natural world, of cooperation and mutually beneficial relationships, and translating these principles into actions” (176).Permaculture Practice as Assemblage Scott Cato’s definition of permaculture helps us to understand both its conceptual framework as it is set out in permaculture manuals and textbooks, and the way it operates in practice at an individual, local, regional, national and global level, as an assemblage. Using the idea of assemblage, as defined by Jane Bennett, we are able to understand permaculture as part of an “ad hoc grouping”, a “collectivity” made up of many types of actors, humans, non humans, nature and culture, whose “coherence co-exists with energies and countercultures that exceed and confound it” (445-6). Put slightly differently, permaculture is part of “living” assemblage whose existence is not dependent on or governed by a “central power”. Nor can it be influenced by any single entity or member (445-6). Rather, permaculture is a “complex, gigantic whole” that is “made up variously, of somatic, technological, cultural, and atmospheric elements” (447).In considering permaculture as an assemblage that includes countercultural elements, we specifically adhere to John Law’s description of Actor Network Theory as an approach that relies on an empirical foundation rather than a theoretical one in order to “tell stories about ‘how’ relationships assemble or don’t” (141). The hybrid nature of permaculture design involving both human and non human stakeholders and their social and material dependencies can be understood as an “assembly” or “thing,” where everything not only plays its part relationally but where “matters of fact” are combined with “matters of concern” (Latour, "Critique"). As Barry explains, permaculture is a “holistic and systems-based approach to understanding and designing human-nature relations” (82). Permaculture principles are based on the enactment of interconnections, continuous feedback and reshuffling among plants, humans, animals, chemistry, social life, things, energy, built and natural environment, and tools.Bruno Latour calls this kind of relationality a “sphere” or a “network” that comprises of many interconnected nodes (Latour, "Actor-Network" 31). The connections between the nodes are not arbitrary, they are based on “associations” that dissolve the “micro-macro distinctions” of near and far, emphasizing the “global entity” of networks (361-381). Not everything is globalised but the global networks that structure the planet affect everything and everyone. In the context of permaculture, we argue that despite being highly connected through a network of digital and analogue platforms, the movement remains localised. In other words, permaculture is both local and global articulating global matters of concern such as food production, renewable energy sources, and ecological wellbeing in deeply localised variants.These address how the matters of concerns engendered by global networks in specific places interact with local elements. A community based permaculture practice in a desert area, for instance, will engage with storing renewable energy, or growing food crops and maintaining a stable ecology using the same twelve design principles and ethics as an educational business doing rooftop permaculture in a major urban centre. The localised applications, however, will result in a very different permaculture assemblage of animals, plants, technologies, people, affects, discourses, pedagogies, media, images, and resources.Similarly, if we consider permaculture as a network of interconnected nodes on a larger scale, such as in the case of national organisations, we can see how each node provides a counterpoint that models ecological best practices with respect to ingrained everyday ways of doing things, corporate and conventional agriculture, and so on. This adaptability and ability to effect practices has meant that permaculture’s sphere of influence has grown to include public institutions, such as city councils, public and private spaces, and schools.A short description of some of the nodes in the evolving permaculture assemblage in Sydney, where we live, is an example of the way permaculture has advanced from its alternative lifestyle beginnings to become part of the repertoire of contemporary activism. These practices, in turn, make room for accepted ways of doing things to move in new directions. In this assemblage each constellation operates within well established sites: local councils, public spaces, community groups, and businesses, while changing the conventional way these sites operate.The permaculture assemblage in Sydney includes individuals and communities in local groups coordinated in a city-wide network, Permaculture Sydney, connected to similar regional networks along the NSW seaboard; local government initiatives, such as in Randwick, Sydney, and Pittwater and policies like Sustainable City Living; community gardens like the inner city food forest at Angel Street or the hybrid public open park and educational space at the Permaculture Interpretive Garden; private permaculture gardens; experiments in grassroot urban permaculture and in urban agriculture; gardening, education and landscape business specialising in permaculture design, like Milkwood and Sydney Organic Gardens; loose groups of permaculturalists gathering around projects, such as Permablitz Sydney; media personalities and programs, as in the case of the hugely successful garden show Gardening Australia hosted by Costa Georgiadis; germane organisations dedicated to food sovereignty or seed saving, the Transition Towns movement; farmers’ markets and food coops; and multifarious private/public sustainability initiatives.Permaculture is a set of practices that, in themselves are not inherently “against” anything, yet empower people to form their own lifestyles and communities. After all, permaculture is a design system, a way to analyse space, and body of knowledge based on set principles and ethics. The identification of permaculture as a form of activism, or indeed as countercultural, is externally imposed, and therefore contingent on the ways conventional forms of housing and food production are understood as being in opposition.As we have shown elsewhere (2014) thinking through design practices as assemblages can describe hybrid forms of participation based on relationships to broader political movements, disciplines and organisations.Use Edges and Value the Marginal The eleventh permaculture design principle calls for an appreciation of the marginal and the edge: “The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system” (permacultureprinciples.com). In other words the edge is understood as the site where things come together generating new possible paths and interactions. In this paper we have taken this metaphor to think through the relations between permaculture and counterculture. We argued that permaculture emerged from the countercultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s and intersected with other fringe alternative lifestyle experiments. In its contemporary form the “counter” value needs to be understood as counterpoint rather than as a position of pure oppositionality to the mainstream.The edge in permaculture is not a boundary on the periphery of a design, but a site of interconnection, hybridity and exchange, that produces adaptable and different possibilities. Similarly permaculture shares with forms of contemporary activism “flexible action repertoires” (Mayer 203) able to interconnect and traverse diverse contexts, including mainstream institutions. Permaculture deploys an action repertoire that integrates not segregates and that is aimed at inviting a shift in everyday practices and at doing things differently: differently from the mainstream and from the way global capital operates, without claiming to be in a position outside global capital flows. In brief, the assemblages of practices, ideas, and people generated by permaculture, like the ones described in this paper, as a counterpoint bring together discordant elements on equal terms.ReferencesBarry, John. The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon Constrained World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Bennett, Jane. “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout.” Public Culture 17.3 (2005): 445-65.Castells, Manuel. “The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication, Networks, and Global Governance.” ANNALS, AAPSS 616 (2008): 78-93.Crosby, Alexandra, Jacqueline Lorber-Kasunic, and Ilaria Vanni. “Mapping Hybrid Design Participation in Sydney.” Proceedings of the Arte-Polis 5th International Conference – Reflections on Creativity: Public Engagement and the Making of Place. Bandung, 2014.Grayson, Russ, and Steve Payne. “Tasmanian Roots.” New Internationalist 402 (2007): 10–11.Grayson, Russ. “The Permaculture Papers 2: The Dawn.” PacificEdge 2010. 6 Oct. 2014 ‹http://pacific-edge.info/2010/10/the-permaculture-papers-2-the-dawn›.Holmgren, David. “About Permaculture.” Holmgren Design, Permaculture Vision and Innovation. 2014.Julier, Guy. “From Design Culture to Design Activism.” Design and Culture 5.2 (2013): 215-236.Law, John. “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics.” In The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. 2009. 141-158. Latour, Bruno. “On Actor-Network Theory. A Few Clarifications plus More than a Few Complications.” Philosophia, 25.3 (1996): 47-64.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48. 6 Dec. 2014 ‹http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/articles/article/089.html›.Levin, Simon A. The Princeton Guide to Ecology. Princeton: Princeton UP. 2009Lockyer, Joshua, and James R. Veteto, eds. Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillages. Vol. 17. Berghahn Books, 2013.Madge, Pauline. “Ecological Design: A New Critique.” Design Issues 13.2 (1997): 44-54.Mayer, Margit. “Manuel Castells’ The City and the Grassroots.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.1 (2006): 202–206.Markussen, Thomas. “The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism: Enacting Design between Art and Politics.” Design Issues 29.1 (2013): 38-50.McGregor, Craig. “What Counter-Culture?” Meanjin Quarterly 34.1 (1975).McGregor, Craig. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Meanjin Quarterly 30.2 (1971): 176-179.McKay, G. “DiY Culture: Notes Toward an Intro.” In G. McKay, ed., DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain, London: Verso, 1988. 1-53.Metcalf, William J. “A Classification of Alternative Lifestyle Groups.” Journal of Sociology 20.66 (1984): 66–80.Milkwood. “Frequently Asked Questions.” 30 Sep. 2014. 6 Dec. 2014 ‹http://www.milkwoodpermaculture.com.au/permaculture/faqs›.Mollison, Bill, and David Holmgren. Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements. Melbourne: Transworld Publishers, 1978.Musgrove, F. Ecstasy and Holiness: Counter Culture and the Open Society. London: Methuen and Co., 1974.permacultureprinciples.com. 25 Nov. 2014.Pink, Sarah. Situating Everyday Life. London: Sage, 2012.Robinson, Shirleene. “1960s Counter-Culture in Australia: the Search for Personal Freedom.” In The 1960s in Australia: People, Power and Politics, eds. Shirleene Robinson and Julie Ustinoff. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.Scott-Cato. Molly. Environment and Economy. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.Stephens, Julie. Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1998.Stickells, Lee. “‘And Everywhere Those Strange Polygonal Igloos’: Framing a History of Australian Countercultural Architecture.” In Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 30: Open. Vol. 2. Eds. Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach. Gold Coast, Qld: SAHANZ, 2013. 555-568.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction This article is a study in anxiety with regard to social online spaces (SOS) conceived of as dark. There are two possible ways to define ‘dark’ in this context. The first is that communication is dark because it either has limited distribution, is not open to all users (closed groups are a case example) or hidden. The second definition, linked as a result of the first, is the way that communication via these means is interpreted and understood. Dark social spaces disrupt the accepted top-down flow by the ‘gazing elite’ (data aggregators including social media), but anxious users might need to strain to notice what is out there, and this in turn destabilises one’s reception of the scene. In an environment where surveillance technologies are proliferating, this article examines contemporary, dark, interconnected, and interactive communications for the entangled affordances that might be brought to bear. A provocation is that resistance through counterveillance or “sousveillance” is one possibility. An alternative (or addition) is retreating to or building ‘dark’ spaces that are less surveilled and (perhaps counterintuitively) less fearful. This article considers critically the notion of dark social online spaces via four broad socio-technical concerns connected to the big social media services that have helped increase a tendency for fearful anxiety produced by surveillance and the perceived implications for personal privacy. It also shines light on the aspect of darkness where some users are spurred to actively seek alternative, dark social online spaces. Since the 1970s, public-key cryptosystems typically preserved security for websites, emails, and sensitive health, government, and military data, but this is now reduced (Williams). We have seen such systems exploited via cyberattacks and misappropriated data acquired by affiliations such as Facebook-Cambridge Analytica for targeted political advertising during the 2016 US elections. Via the notion of “parasitic strategies”, such events can be described as news/information hacks “whose attack vectors target a system’s weak points with the help of specific strategies” (von Nordheim and Kleinen-von Königslöw, 88). In accord with Wilson and Serisier’s arguments (178), emerging technologies facilitate rapid data sharing, collection, storage, and processing wherein subsequent “outcomes are unpredictable”. This would also include the effect of acquiescence. In regard to our digital devices, for some, being watched overtly—through cameras encased in toys, computers, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) to digital street ads that determine the resonance of human emotions in public places including bus stops, malls, and train stations—is becoming normalised (McStay, Emotional AI). It might appear that consumers immersed within this Internet of Things (IoT) are themselves comfortable interacting with devices that record sound and capture images for easy analysis and distribution across the communications networks. A counter-claim is that mainstream social media corporations have cultivated a sense of digital resignation “produced when people desire to control the information digital entities have about them but feel unable to do so” (Draper and Turow, 1824). Careful consumers’ trust in mainstream media is waning, with readers observing a strong presence of big media players in the industry and are carefully picking their publications and public intellectuals to follow (Mahmood, 6). A number now also avoid the mainstream internet in favour of alternate dark sites. This is done by users with “varying backgrounds, motivations and participation behaviours that may be idiosyncratic (as they are rooted in the respective person’s biography and circ*mstance)” (Quandt, 42). By way of connection with dark internet studies via Biddle et al. (1; see also Lasica), the “darknet” is a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content … not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks. Examples of darknets are peer-to-peer file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and key or password sharing on email and newsgroups. As we note from the quote above, the “dark web” uses existing public and private networks that facilitate communication via the Internet. Gehl (1220; see also Gehl and McKelvey) has detailed that this includes “hidden sites that end in ‘.onion’ or ‘.i2p’ or other Top-Level Domain names only available through modified browsers or special software. Accessing I2P sites requires a special routing program ... . Accessing .onion sites requires Tor [The Onion Router]”. For some, this gives rise to social anxiety, read here as stemming from that which is not known, and an exaggerated sense of danger, which makes fight or flight seem the only options. This is often justified or exacerbated by the changing media and communication landscape and depicted in popular documentaries such as The Social Dilemma or The Great Hack, which affect public opinion on the unknown aspects of internet spaces and the uses of personal data. The question for this article remains whether the fear of the dark is justified. Consider that most often one will choose to make one’s intimate bedroom space dark in order to have a good night’s rest. We might pleasurably escape into a cinema’s darkness for the stories told therein, or walk along a beach at night enjoying unseen breezes. Most do not avoid these experiences, choosing to actively seek them out. Drawing this thread, then, is the case made here that agency can also be found in the dark by resisting socio-political structural harms. 1. Digital Futures and Anxiety of the Dark Fear of the darkI have a constant fear that something's always nearFear of the darkFear of the darkI have a phobia that someone's always there In the lyrics to the song “Fear of the Dark” (1992) by British heavy metal group Iron Maiden is a sense that that which is unknown and unseen causes fear and anxiety. Holding a fear of the dark is not unusual and varies in degree for adults as it does for children (Fellous and Arbib). Such anxiety connected to the dark does not always concern darkness itself. It can also be a concern for the possible or imagined dangers that are concealed by the darkness itself as a result of cognitive-emotional interactions (McDonald, 16). Extending this claim is this article’s non-binary assertion that while for some technology and what it can do is frequently misunderstood and shunned as a result, for others who embrace the possibilities and actively take it on it is learning by attentively partaking. Mistakes, solecism, and frustrations are part of the process. Such conceptual theorising falls along a continuum of thinking. Global interconnectivity of communications networks has certainly led to consequent concerns (Turkle Alone Together). Much focus for anxiety has been on the impact upon social and individual inner lives, levels of media concentration, and power over and commercialisation of the internet. Of specific note is that increasing commercial media influence—such as Facebook and its acquisition of WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Instagram, CRTL-labs (translating movements and neural impulses into digital signals), LiveRail (video advertising technology), Chainspace (Blockchain)—regularly changes the overall dynamics of the online environment (Turow and Kavanaugh). This provocation was born out recently when Facebook disrupted the delivery of news to Australian audiences via its service. Mainstream social online spaces (SOS) are platforms which provide more than the delivery of media alone and have been conceptualised predominantly in a binary light. On the one hand, they can be depicted as tools for the common good of society through notional widespread access and as places for civic participation and discussion, identity expression, education, and community formation (Turkle; Bruns; Cinque and Brown; Jenkins). This end of the continuum of thinking about SOS seems set hard against the view that SOS are operating as businesses with strategies that manipulate consumers to generate revenue through advertising, data, venture capital for advanced research and development, and company profit, on the other hand. In between the two polar ends of this continuum are the range of other possibilities, the shades of grey, that add contemporary nuance to understanding SOS in regard to what they facilitate, what the various implications might be, and for whom. By way of a brief summary, anxiety of the dark is steeped in the practices of privacy-invasive social media giants such as Facebook and its ancillary companies. Second are the advertising technology companies, surveillance contractors, and intelligence agencies that collect and monitor our actions and related data; as well as the increased ease of use and interoperability brought about by Web 2.0 that has seen a disconnection between technological infrastructure and social connection that acts to limit user permissions and online affordances. Third are concerns for the negative effects associated with depressed mental health and wellbeing caused by “psychologically damaging social networks”, through sleep loss, anxiety, poor body image, real world relationships, and the fear of missing out (FOMO; Royal Society for Public Health (UK) and the Young Health Movement). Here the harms are both individual and societal. Fourth is the intended acceleration toward post-quantum IoT (Fernández-Caramés), as quantum computing’s digital components are continually being miniaturised. This is coupled with advances in electrical battery capacity and interconnected telecommunications infrastructures. The result of such is that the ontogenetic capacity of the powerfully advanced network/s affords supralevel surveillance. What this means is that through devices and the services that they provide, individuals’ data is commodified (Neff and Nafus; Nissenbaum and Patterson). Personal data is enmeshed in ‘things’ requiring that the decisions that are both overt, subtle, and/or hidden (dark) are scrutinised for the various ways they shape social norms and create consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society (Gillespie). Data and personal information are retrievable from devices, sharable in SOS, and potentially exposed across networks. For these reasons, some have chosen to go dark by being “off the grid”, judiciously selecting their means of communications and their ‘friends’ carefully. 2. Is There Room for Privacy Any More When Everyone in SOS Is Watching? An interesting turn comes through counterarguments against overarching institutional surveillance that underscore the uses of technologies to watch the watchers. This involves a practice of counter-surveillance whereby technologies are tools of resistance to go ‘dark’ and are used by political activists in protest situations for both communication and avoiding surveillance. This is not new and has long existed in an increasingly dispersed media landscape (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes). For example, counter-surveillance video footage has been accessed and made available via live-streaming channels, with commentary in SOS augmenting networking possibilities for niche interest groups or micropublics (Wilson and Serisier, 178). A further example is the Wordpress site Fitwatch, appealing for an end to what the site claims are issues associated with police surveillance (fitwatch.org.uk and endpolicesurveillance.wordpress.com). Users of these sites are called to post police officers’ identity numbers and photographs in an attempt to identify “cops” that might act to “misuse” UK Anti-terrorism legislation against activists during legitimate protests. Others that might be interested in doing their own “monitoring” are invited to reach out to identified personal email addresses or other private (dark) messaging software and application services such as Telegram (freeware and cross-platform). In their work on surveillance, Mann and Ferenbok (18) propose that there is an increase in “complex constructs between power and the practices of seeing, looking, and watching/sensing in a networked culture mediated by mobile/portable/wearable computing devices and technologies”. By way of critical definition, Mann and Ferenbok (25) clarify that “where the viewer is in a position of power over the subject, this is considered surveillance, but where the viewer is in a lower position of power, this is considered sousveillance”. It is the aspect of sousveillance that is empowering to those using dark SOS. One might consider that not all surveillance is “bad” nor institutionalised. It is neither overtly nor formally regulated—as yet. Like most technologies, many of the surveillant technologies are value-neutral until applied towards specific uses, according to Mann and Ferenbok (18). But this is part of the ‘grey area’ for understanding the impact of dark SOS in regard to which actors or what nations are developing tools for surveillance, where access and control lies, and with what effects into the future. 3. Big Brother Watches, So What Are the Alternatives: Whither the Gazing Elite in Dark SOS? By way of conceptual genealogy, consideration of contemporary perceptions of surveillance in a visually networked society (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes) might be usefully explored through a revisitation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, applied here as a metaphor for contemporary surveillance. Arguably, this is a foundational theoretical model for integrated methods of social control (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 192-211), realised in the “panopticon” (prison) in 1787 by Jeremy Bentham (Bentham and Božovič, 29-95) during a period of social reformation aimed at the improvement of the individual. Like the power for social control over the incarcerated in a panopticon, police power, in order that it be effectively exercised, “had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible … like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception” (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 213–4). In grappling with the impact of SOS for the individual and the collective in post-digital times, we can trace out these early ruminations on the complex documentary organisation through state-controlled apparatuses (such as inspectors and paid observers including “secret agents”) via Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 214; Subject and Power, 326-7) for comparison to commercial operators like Facebook. Today, artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition technology (FRT), and closed-circuit television (CCTV) for video surveillance are used for social control of appropriate behaviours. Exemplified by governments and the private sector is the use of combined technologies to maintain social order, from ensuring citizens cross the street only on green lights, to putting rubbish in the correct recycling bin or be publicly shamed, to making cashless payments in stores. The actions see advantages for individual and collective safety, sustainability, and convenience, but also register forms of behaviour and attitudes with predictive capacities. This gives rise to suspicions about a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour over time. Returning to Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 135), the impact of this finds a dissociation of power from the individual, whereby they become unwittingly impelled into pre-existing social structures, leading to a ‘normalisation’ and acceptance of such systems. If we are talking about the dark, anxiety is key for a Ministry of SOS. Following Foucault again (Subject and Power, 326-7), there is the potential for a crawling, creeping governance that was once distinct but is itself increasingly hidden and growing. A blanket call for some form of ongoing scrutiny of such proliferating powers might be warranted, but with it comes regulation that, while offering certain rights and protections, is not without consequences. For their part, a number of SOS platforms had little to no moderation for explicit content prior to December 2018, and in terms of power, notwithstanding important anxiety connected to arguments that children and the vulnerable need protections from those that would seek to take advantage, this was a crucial aspect of community building and self-expression that resulted in this freedom of expression. In unearthing the extent that individuals are empowered arising from the capacity to post sexual self-images, Tiidenberg ("Bringing Sexy Back") considered that through dark SOS (read here as unregulated) some users could work in opposition to the mainstream consumer culture that provides select and limited representations of bodies and their sexualities. This links directly to Mondin’s exploration of the abundance of queer and feminist p*rnography on dark SOS as a “counterpolitics of visibility” (288). This work resulted in a reasoned claim that the technological structure of dark SOS created a highly political and affective social space that users valued. What also needs to be underscored is that many users also believed that such a space could not be replicated on other mainstream SOS because of the differences in architecture and social norms. Cho (47) worked with this theory to claim that dark SOS are modern-day examples in a history of queer individuals having to rely on “underground economies of expression and relation”. Discussions such as these complicate what dark SOS might now become in the face of ‘adult’ content moderation and emerging tracking technologies to close sites or locate individuals that transgress social norms. Further, broader questions are raised about how content moderation fits in with the public space conceptualisations of SOS more generally. Increasingly, “there is an app for that” where being able to identify the poster of an image or an author of an unknown text is seen as crucial. While there is presently no standard approach, models for combining instance-based and profile-based features such as SVM for determining authorship attribution are in development, with the result that potentially far less content will remain hidden in the future (Bacciu et al.). 4. There’s Nothing New under the Sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9) For some, “[the] high hopes regarding the positive impact of the Internet and digital participation in civic society have faded” (Schwarzenegger, 99). My participant observation over some years in various SOS, however, finds that critical concern has always existed. Views move along the spectrum of thinking from deep scepticisms (Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil) to wondrous techo-utopian promises (Negroponte, Being Digital). Indeed, concerns about the (then) new technologies of wireless broadcasting can be compared with today’s anxiety over the possible effects of the internet and SOS. Inglis (7) recalls, here, too, were fears that humanity was tampering with some dangerous force; might wireless wave be causing thunderstorms, droughts, floods? Sterility or strokes? Such anxieties soon evaporated; but a sense of mystery might stay longer with evangelists for broadcasting than with a laity who soon took wireless for granted and settled down to enjoy the products of a process they need not understand. As the analogy above makes clear, just as audiences came to use ‘the wireless’ and later the internet regularly, it is reasonable to argue that dark SOS will also gain widespread understanding and find greater acceptance. Dark social spaces are simply the recent development of internet connectivity and communication more broadly. The dark SOS afford choice to be connected beyond mainstream offerings, which some users avoid for their perceived manipulation of content and user both. As part of the wider array of dark web services, the resilience of dark social spaces is reinforced by the proliferation of users as opposed to decentralised replication. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be used for anonymity in parallel to TOR access, but they guarantee only anonymity to the client. A VPN cannot guarantee anonymity to the server or the internet service provider (ISP). While users may use pseudonyms rather than actual names as seen on Facebook and other SOS, users continue to take to the virtual spaces they inhabit their off-line, ‘real’ foibles, problems, and idiosyncrasies (Chenault). To varying degrees, however, people also take their best intentions to their interactions in the dark. The hyper-efficient tools now deployed can intensify this, which is the great advantage attracting some users. In balance, however, in regard to online information access and dissemination, critical examination of what is in the public’s interest, and whether content should be regulated or controlled versus allowing a free flow of information where users self-regulate their online behaviour, is fraught. O’Loughlin (604) was one of the first to claim that there will be voluntary loss through negative liberty or freedom from (freedom from unwanted information or influence) and an increase in positive liberty or freedom to (freedom to read or say anything); hence, freedom from surveillance and interference is a kind of negative liberty, consistent with both libertarianism and liberalism. Conclusion The early adopters of initial iterations of SOS were hopeful and liberal (utopian) in their beliefs about universality and ‘free’ spaces of open communication between like-minded others. This was a way of virtual networking using a visual motivation (led by images, text, and sounds) for consequent interaction with others (Cinque, Visual Networking). The structural transformation of the public sphere in a Habermasian sense—and now found in SOS and their darker, hidden or closed social spaces that might ensure a counterbalance to the power of those with influence—towards all having equal access to platforms for presenting their views, and doing so respectfully, is as ever problematised. Broadly, this is no more so, however, than for mainstream SOS or for communicating in the world. References Bacciu, Andrea, Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Eugenio Nerio Nemmi, Valerio Neri, and Julinda Stefa. “Cross-Domain Authorship Attribution Combining Instance Based and Profile-Based Features.” CLEF (Working Notes). Lugano, Switzerland, 9-12 Sep. 2019. Bentham, Jeremy, and Miran Božovič. The Panopticon Writings. London: Verso Trade, 1995. Biddle, Peter, et al. “The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution.” Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management. Vol. 6. Washington DC, 2002. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Chenault, Brittney G. “Developing Personal and Emotional Relationships via Computer-Mediated Communication.” CMC Magazine 5.5 (1998). 1 May 2020 <http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1998/may/chenault.html>. Cho, Alexander. “Queer Reverb: Tumblr, Affect, Time.” Networked Affect. Eds. K. Hillis, S. Paasonen, and M. Petit. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015: 43-58. Cinque, Toija. Changing Media Landscapes: Visual Networking. London: Oxford UP, 2015. ———. “Visual Networking: Australia's Media Landscape.” Global Media Journal: Australian Edition 6.1 (2012): 1-8. Cinque, Toija, and Adam Brown. “Educating Generation Next: Screen Media Use, Digital Competencies, and Tertiary Education.” Digital Culture & Education 7.1 (2015). Draper, Nora A., and Joseph Turow. “The Corporate Cultivation of Digital Resignation.” New Media & Society 21.8 (2019): 1824-1839. Fellous, Jean-Marc, and Michael A. Arbib, eds. Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Fernández-Caramés, Tiago M. “From Pre-Quantum to Post-Quantum IoT Security: A Survey on Quantum-Resistant Cryptosystems for the Internet of Things.” IEEE Internet of Things Journal 7.7 (2019): 6457-6480. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison [Discipline and Punish—The Birth of The Prison]. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1977. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Michel Foucault: Power, the Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984. Vol. 3. Trans. R. Hurley and others. Ed. J.D. Faubion. London: Penguin, 2001. Gehl, Robert W. Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2P. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2018. Gehl, Robert, and Fenwick McKelvey. “Bugging Out: Darknets as Parasites of Large-Scale Media Objects.” Media, Culture & Society 41.2 (2019): 219-235. Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. London: Yale UP, 2018. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Inglis, Ken S. This Is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission 1932–1983. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1983. Iron Maiden. “Fear of the Dark.” London: EMI, 1992. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. Lasica, J. D. Darknet: Hollywood’s War against the Digital Generation. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2005. Mahmood, Mimrah. “Australia's Evolving Media Landscape.” 13 Apr. 2021 <https://www.meltwater.com/en/resources/australias-evolving-media-landscape>. Mann, Steve, and Joseph Ferenbok. “New Media and the Power Politics of Sousveillance in a Surveillance-Dominated World.” Surveillance & Society 11.1/2 (2013): 18-34. McDonald, Alexander J. “Cortical Pathways to the Mammalian Amygdala.” Progress in Neurobiology 55.3 (1998): 257-332. McStay, Andrew. Emotional AI: The Rise of Empathic Media. London: Sage, 2018. Mondin, Alessandra. “‘Tumblr Mostly, Great Empowering Images’: Blogging, Reblogging and Scrolling Feminist, Queer and BDSM Desires.” Journal of Gender Studies 26.3 (2017): 282-292. Neff, Gina, and Dawn Nafus. Self-Tracking. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016. Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Nissenbaum, Helen, and Heather Patterson. “Biosensing in Context: Health Privacy in a Connected World.” Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life. Ed. Dawn Nafus. 2016. 68-79. O’Loughlin, Ben. “The Political Implications of Digital Innovations.” Information, Communication and Society 4.4 (2001): 595–614. Quandt, Thorsten. “Dark Participation.” Media and Communication 6.4 (2018): 36-48. Royal Society for Public Health (UK) and the Young Health Movement. “#Statusofmind.” 2017. 2 Apr. 2021 <https://www.rsph.org.uk/our-work/campaigns/status-of-mind.html>. Statista. “Number of IoT devices 2015-2025.” 27 Nov. 2020 <https://www.statista.com/statistics/471264/iot-number-of-connected-devices-worldwide/>. Schwarzenegger, Christian. “Communities of Darkness? Users and Uses of Anti-System Alternative Media between Audience and Community.” Media and Communication 9.1 (2021): 99-109. Stoll, Clifford. Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. Anchor, 1995. Tiidenberg, Katrin. “Bringing Sexy Back: Reclaiming the Body Aesthetic via Self-Shooting.” Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 8.1 (2014). The Great Hack. Dirs. Karim Amer, Jehane Noujaim. Netflix, 2019. The Social Dilemma. Dir. Jeff Orlowski. Netflix, 2020. Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. UK: Hachette, 2017. Turow, Joseph, and Andrea L. Kavanaugh, eds. The Wired Homestead: An MIT Press Sourcebook on the Internet and the Family. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Von Nordheim, Gerret, and Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw. “Uninvited Dinner Guests: A Theoretical Perspective on the Antagonists of Journalism Based on Serres’ Parasite.” Media and Communication 9.1 (2021): 88-98. Williams, Chris K. “Configuring Enterprise Public Key Infrastructures to Permit Integrated Deployment of Signature, Encryption and Access Control Systems.” MILCOM 2005-2005 IEEE Military Communications Conference. IEEE, 2005. Wilson, Dean, and Tanya Serisier. “Video Activism and the Ambiguities of Counter-Surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 8.2 (2010): 166-180.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944). It is worth revisiting the old boy’s grumpiness, because the rhetoric he so niftily skewers continues in our own time. Facebook features “Peace on Facebook” and even claims that it can “decrease world conflict” through inter-cultural communication. Twitter has announced itself as “a triumph of humanity” (“A Cyber-House” 61). Queue George. In between Orwell and latter-day hoody cybertarians, a whole host of excitable public intellectuals announced the impending end of materiality through emergent media forms. Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Daniel Bell, Ithiel de Sola Pool, George Gilder, Alvin Toffler—the list of 1960s futurists goes on and on. And this wasn’t just a matter of punditry: the OECD decreed the coming of the “information society” in 1975 and the European Union (EU) followed suit in 1979, while IBM merrily declared an “information age” in 1977. Bell theorized this technological utopia as post-ideological, because class would cease to matter (Mattelart). Polluting industries seemingly no longer represented the dynamic core of industrial capitalism; instead, market dynamism radiated from a networked, intellectual core of creative and informational activities. The new information and knowledge-based economies would rescue First World hegemony from an “insurgent world” that lurked within as well as beyond itself (Schiller). Orwell’s others and the Cold-War futurists propagated one of the most destructive myths shaping both public debate and scholarly studies of the media, culture, and communication. They convinced generations of analysts, activists, and arrivistes that the promises and problems of the media could be understood via metaphors of the environment, and that the media were weightless and virtual. The famous medium they wished us to see as the message —a substance as vital to our wellbeing as air, water, and soil—turned out to be no such thing. Today’s cybertarians inherit their anti-Marxist, anti-materialist positions, as a casual glance at any new media journal, culture-industry magazine, or bourgeois press outlet discloses. The media are undoubtedly important instruments of social cohesion and fragmentation, political power and dissent, democracy and demagoguery, and other fraught extensions of human consciousness. But talk of media systems as equivalent to physical ecosystems—fashionable among marketers and media scholars alike—is predicated on the notion that they are environmentally benign technologies. This has never been true, from the beginnings of print to today’s cloud-covered computing. Our new book Greening the Media focuses on the environmental impact of the media—the myriad ways that media technology consumes, despoils, and wastes natural resources. We introduce ideas, stories, and facts that have been marginal or absent from popular, academic, and professional histories of media technology. Throughout, ecological issues have been at the core of our work and we immodestly think the same should apply to media communications, and cultural studies more generally. We recognize that those fields have contributed valuable research and teaching that address environmental questions. For instance, there is an abundant literature on representations of the environment in cinema, how to communicate environmental messages successfully, and press coverage of climate change. That’s not enough. You may already know that media technologies contain toxic substances. You may have signed an on-line petition protesting the hazardous and oppressive conditions under which workers assemble cell phones and computers. But you may be startled, as we were, by the scale and pervasiveness of these environmental risks. They are present in and around every site where electronic and electric devices are manufactured, used, and thrown away, poisoning humans, animals, vegetation, soil, air and water. We are using the term “media” as a portmanteau word to cover a multitude of cultural and communications machines and processes—print, film, radio, television, information and communications technologies (ICT), and consumer electronics (CE). This is not only for analytical convenience, but because there is increasing overlap between the sectors. CE connect to ICT and vice versa; televisions resemble computers; books are read on telephones; newspapers are written through clouds; and so on. Cultural forms and gadgets that were once separate are now linked. The currently fashionable notion of convergence doesn’t quite capture the vastness of this integration, which includes any object with a circuit board, scores of accessories that plug into it, and a global nexus of labor and environmental inputs and effects that produce and flow from it. In 2007, a combination of ICT/CE and media production accounted for between 2 and 3 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted around the world (“Gartner Estimates,”; International Telecommunication Union; Malmodin et al.). Between twenty and fifty million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) are generated annually, much of it via discarded cell phones and computers, which affluent populations throw out regularly in order to buy replacements. (Presumably this fits the narcissism of small differences that distinguishes them from their own past.) E-waste is historically produced in the Global North—Australasia, Western Europe, Japan, and the US—and dumped in the Global South—Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southern and Southeast Asia, and China. It takes the form of a thousand different, often deadly, materials for each electrical and electronic gadget. This trend is changing as India and China generate their own media detritus (Robinson; Herat). Enclosed hard drives, backlit screens, cathode ray tubes, wiring, capacitors, and heavy metals pose few risks while these materials remain encased. But once discarded and dismantled, ICT/CE have the potential to expose workers and ecosystems to a morass of toxic components. Theoretically, “outmoded” parts could be reused or swapped for newer parts to refurbish devices. But items that are defined as waste undergo further destruction in order to collect remaining parts and valuable metals, such as gold, silver, copper, and rare-earth elements. This process causes serious health risks to bones, brains, stomachs, lungs, and other vital organs, in addition to birth defects and disrupted biological development in children. Medical catastrophes can result from lead, cadmium, mercury, other heavy metals, poisonous fumes emitted in search of precious metals, and such carcinogenic compounds as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, polyvinyl chloride, and flame retardants (Maxwell and Miller 13). The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency estimates that by 2007 US residents owned approximately three billion electronic devices, with an annual turnover rate of 400 million units, and well over half such purchases made by women. Overall CE ownership varied with age—adults under 45 typically boasted four gadgets; those over 65 made do with one. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) says US$145 billion was expended in the sector in 2006 in the US alone, up 13% on the previous year. The CEA refers joyously to a “consumer love affair with technology continuing at a healthy clip.” In the midst of a recession, 2009 saw $165 billion in sales, and households owned between fifteen and twenty-four gadgets on average. By 2010, US$233 billion was spent on electronic products, three-quarters of the population owned a computer, nearly half of all US adults owned an MP3 player, and 85% had a cell phone. By all measures, the amount of ICT/CE on the planet is staggering. As investigative science journalist, Elizabeth Grossman put it: “no industry pushes products into the global market on the scale that high-tech electronics does” (Maxwell and Miller 2). In 2007, “of the 2.25 million tons of TVs, cell phones and computer products ready for end-of-life management, 18% (414,000 tons) was collected for recycling and 82% (1.84 million tons) was disposed of, primarily in landfill” (Environmental Protection Agency 1). Twenty million computers fell obsolete across the US in 1998, and the rate was 130,000 a day by 2005. It has been estimated that the five hundred million personal computers discarded in the US between 1997 and 2007 contained 6.32 billion pounds of plastics, 1.58 billion pounds of lead, three million pounds of cadmium, 1.9 million pounds of chromium, and 632000 pounds of mercury (Environmental Protection Agency; Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 6). The European Union is expected to generate upwards of twelve million tons annually by 2020 (Commission of the European Communities 17). While refrigerators and dangerous refrigerants account for the bulk of EU e-waste, about 44% of the most toxic e-waste measured in 2005 came from medium-to-small ICT/CE: computer monitors, TVs, printers, ink cartridges, telecommunications equipment, toys, tools, and anything with a circuit board (Commission of the European Communities 31-34). Understanding the enormity of the environmental problems caused by making, using, and disposing of media technologies should arrest our enthusiasm for them. But intellectual correctives to the “love affair” with technology, or technophilia, have come and gone without establishing much of a foothold against the breathtaking flood of gadgets and the propaganda that proclaims their awe-inspiring capabilities.[i] There is a peculiar enchantment with the seeming magic of wireless communication, touch-screen phones and tablets, flat-screen high-definition televisions, 3-D IMAX cinema, mobile computing, and so on—a totemic, quasi-sacred power that the historian of technology David Nye has named the technological sublime (Nye Technological Sublime 297).[ii] We demonstrate in our book why there is no place for the technological sublime in projects to green the media. But first we should explain why such symbolic power does not accrue to more mundane technologies; after all, for the time-strapped cook, a pressure cooker does truly magical things. Three important qualities endow ICT/CE with unique symbolic potency—virtuality, volume, and novelty. The technological sublime of media technology is reinforced by the “virtual nature of much of the industry’s content,” which “tends to obscure their responsibility for a vast proliferation of hardware, all with high levels of built-in obsolescence and decreasing levels of efficiency” (Boyce and Lewis 5). Planned obsolescence entered the lexicon as a new “ethics” for electrical engineering in the 1920s and ’30s, when marketers, eager to “habituate people to buying new products,” called for designs to become quickly obsolete “in efficiency, economy, style, or taste” (Grossman 7-8).[iii] This defines the short lifespan deliberately constructed for computer systems (drives, interfaces, operating systems, batteries, etc.) by making tiny improvements incompatible with existing hardware (Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 33-50; Boyce and Lewis). With planned obsolescence leading to “dizzying new heights” of product replacement (Rogers 202), there is an overstated sense of the novelty and preeminence of “new” media—a “cult of the present” is particularly dazzled by the spread of electronic gadgets through globalization (Mattelart and Constantinou 22). References to the symbolic power of media technology can be found in hymnals across the internet and the halls of academe: technologies change us, the media will solve social problems or create new ones, ICTs transform work, monopoly ownership no longer matters, journalism is dead, social networking enables social revolution, and the media deliver a cleaner, post-industrial, capitalism. Here is a typical example from the twilight zone of the technological sublime (actually, the OECD): A major feature of the knowledge-based economy is the impact that ICTs have had on industrial structure, with a rapid growth of services and a relative decline of manufacturing. Services are typically less energy intensive and less polluting, so among those countries with a high and increasing share of services, we often see a declining energy intensity of production … with the emergence of the Knowledge Economy ending the old linear relationship between output and energy use (i.e. partially de-coupling growth and energy use) (Houghton 1) This statement mixes half-truths and nonsense. In reality, old-time, toxic manufacturing has moved to the Global South, where it is ascendant; pollution levels are rising worldwide; and energy consumption is accelerating in residential and institutional sectors, due almost entirely to ICT/CE usage, despite advances in energy conservation technology (a neat instance of the age-old Jevons Paradox). In our book we show how these are all outcomes of growth in ICT/CE, the foundation of the so-called knowledge-based economy. ICT/CE are misleadingly presented as having little or no material ecological impact. In the realm of everyday life, the sublime experience of electronic machinery conceals the physical work and material resources that go into them, while the technological sublime makes the idea that more-is-better palatable, axiomatic; even sexy. In this sense, the technological sublime relates to what Marx called “the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour” once they are in the hands of the consumer, who lusts after them as if they were “independent beings” (77). There is a direct but unseen relationship between technology’s symbolic power and the scale of its environmental impact, which the economist Juliet Schor refers to as a “materiality paradox” —the greater the frenzy to buy goods for their transcendent or nonmaterial cultural meaning, the greater the use of material resources (40-41). We wrote Greening the Media knowing that a study of the media’s effect on the environment must work especially hard to break the enchantment that inflames popular and elite passions for media technologies. We understand that the mere mention of the political-economic arrangements that make shiny gadgets possible, or the environmental consequences of their appearance and disappearance, is bad medicine. It’s an unwelcome buzz kill—not a cool way to converse about cool stuff. But we didn’t write the book expecting to win many allies among high-tech enthusiasts and ICT/CE industry leaders. We do not dispute the importance of information and communication media in our lives and modern social systems. We are media people by profession and personal choice, and deeply immersed in the study and use of emerging media technologies. But we think it’s time for a balanced assessment with less hype and more practical understanding of the relationship of media technologies to the biosphere they inhabit. Media consumers, designers, producers, activists, researchers, and policy makers must find new and effective ways to move ICT/CE production and consumption toward ecologically sound practices. In the course of this project, we found in casual conversation, lecture halls, classroom discussions, and correspondence, consistent and increasing concern with the environmental impact of media technology, especially the deleterious effects of e-waste toxins on workers, air, water, and soil. We have learned that the grip of the technological sublime is not ironclad. Its instability provides a point of departure for investigating and criticizing the relationship between the media and the environment. The media are, and have been for a long time, intimate environmental participants. Media technologies are yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s news, but rarely in the way they should be. The prevailing myth is that the printing press, telegraph, phonograph, photograph, cinema, telephone, wireless radio, television, and internet changed the world without changing the Earth. In reality, each technology has emerged by despoiling ecosystems and exposing workers to harmful environments, a truth obscured by symbolic power and the power of moguls to set the terms by which such technologies are designed and deployed. Those who benefit from ideas of growth, progress, and convergence, who profit from high-tech innovation, monopoly, and state collusion—the military-industrial-entertainment-academic complex and multinational commandants of labor—have for too long ripped off the Earth and workers. As the current celebration of media technology inevitably winds down, perhaps it will become easier to comprehend that digital wonders come at the expense of employees and ecosystems. This will return us to Max Weber’s insistence that we understand technology in a mundane way as a “mode of processing material goods” (27). Further to understanding that ordinariness, we can turn to the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, who noted three decades ago “the failures of technocratic dreams [:] that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Such fantasies derived from the very banality of these introductions—that every time they took place, one more “technical apparatus” was simply “being made at home with the rest of our world’ (548). Media studies can join in this repetitive banality. Or it can withdraw the welcome mat for media technologies that despoil the Earth and wreck the lives of those who make them. In our view, it’s time to green the media by greening media studies. References “A Cyber-House Divided.” Economist 4 Sep. 2010: 61-62. “Gartner Estimates ICT Industry Accounts for 2 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions.” Gartner press release. 6 April 2007. ‹http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867›. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia. Seattle: Basel Action Network, 25 Feb. 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “Central Park.” Trans. Lloyd Spencer with Mark Harrington. New German Critique 34 (1985): 32-58. Biagioli, Mario. “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 816-33. Boyce, Tammy and Justin Lewis, eds. Climate Change and the Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Commission of the European Communities. “Impact Assessment.” Commission Staff Working Paper accompanying the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) (recast). COM (2008) 810 Final. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 3 Dec. 2008. Environmental Protection Agency. Management of Electronic Waste in the United States. Washington, DC: EPA, 2007 Environmental Protection Agency. Statistics on the Management of Used and End-of-Life Electronics. Washington, DC: EPA, 2008 Grossman, Elizabeth. Tackling High-Tech Trash: The E-Waste Explosion & What We Can Do about It. New York: Demos, 2008. ‹http://www.demos.org/pubs/e-waste_FINAL.pdf› Herat, Sunil. “Review: Sustainable Management of Electronic Waste (e-Waste).” Clean 35.4 (2007): 305-10. Houghton, J. “ICT and the Environment in Developing Countries: Opportunities and Developments.” Paper prepared for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2009. International Telecommunication Union. ICTs for Environment: Guidelines for Developing Countries, with a Focus on Climate Change. Geneva: ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division Policies and Strategies Department ITU Telecommunication Development Sector, 2008. Malmodin, Jens, Åsa Moberg, Dag Lundén, Göran Finnveden, and Nina Lövehagen. “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Operational Electricity Use in the ICT and Entertainment & Media Sectors.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 14.5 (2010): 770-90. Marx, Karl. Capital: Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, 3rd ed. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1987. Mattelart, Armand and Costas M. Constantinou. “Communications/Excommunications: An Interview with Armand Mattelart.” Trans. Amandine Bled, Jacques Guot, and Costas Constantinou. Review of International Studies 34.1 (2008): 21-42. Mattelart, Armand. “Cómo nació el mito de Internet.” Trans. Yanina Guthman. El mito internet. Ed. Victor Hugo de la Fuente. Santiago: Editorial aún creemos en los sueños, 2002. 25-32. Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Nye, David E. Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2007. Orwell, George. “As I Please.” Tribune. 12 May 1944. Richtel, Matt. “Consumers Hold on to Products Longer.” New York Times: B1, 26 Feb. 2011. Robinson, Brett H. “E-Waste: An Assessment of Global Production and Environmental Impacts.” Science of the Total Environment 408.2 (2009): 183-91. Rogers, Heather. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: New Press, 2005. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Vols. I and II. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Malden: Blackwell, 1995. Schiller, Herbert I. Information and the Crisis Economy. Norwood: Ablex Publishing, 1984. Schor, Juliet B. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin, 2010. Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials. Los Angeles: Academy Imprints, 2007. Weber, Max. “Remarks on Technology and Culture.” Trans. Beatrix Zumsteg and Thomas M. Kemple. Ed. Thomas M. Kemple. Theory, Culture [i] The global recession that began in 2007 has been the main reason for some declines in Global North energy consumption, slower turnover in gadget upgrades, and longer periods of consumer maintenance of electronic goods (Richtel). [ii] The emergence of the technological sublime has been attributed to the Western triumphs in the post-Second World War period, when technological power supposedly supplanted the power of nature to inspire fear and astonishment (Nye Technology Matters 28). Historian Mario Biagioli explains how the sublime permeates everyday life through technoscience: "If around 1950 the popular imaginary placed science close to the military and away from the home, today’s technoscience frames our everyday life at all levels, down to our notion of the self" (818). [iii] This compulsory repetition is seemingly undertaken each time as a novelty, governed by what German cultural critic Walter Benjamin called, in his awkward but occasionally illuminating prose, "the ever-always-the-same" of "mass-production" cloaked in "a hitherto unheard-of significance" (48).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

A common criticism of the rhythm video games genre — including series like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, is that playing musical simulation games is a waste of time when you could be playing an actual guitar and learning a real skill. A more serious criticism of games cultures draws attention to the degree of e-waste they produce. E-waste or electronic waste includes mobiles phones, computers, televisions and other electronic devices, containing toxic chemicals and metals whose landfill, recycling and salvaging all produce distinct environmental and social problems. The e-waste produced by games like Guitar Hero is obvious in the regular flow of merchandise transforming computer and video games stores into simulation music stores, filled with replica guitars, drum kits, microphones and other products whose half-lives are short and whose obsolescence is anticipated in the annual cycles of consumption and disposal. This paper explores the connection between e-waste and obsolescence in the games industry, and argues for the further consideration of consumers as part of the solution to the problem of e-waste. It uses a case study of the PC digital distribution software platform, Steam, to suggest that the digital distribution of games may offer an alternative model to market driven software and hardware obsolescence, and more generally, that such software platforms might be a place to support cultures of consumption that delay rather than promote hardware obsolescence and its inevitability as e-waste. The question is whether there exists a potential for digital distribution to be a means of not only eliminating the need to physically transport commodities (its current 'green' benefit), but also for supporting consumer practices that further reduce e-waste. The games industry relies on a rapid production and innovation cycle, one that actively enforces hardware obsolescence. Current video game consoles, including the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii, are the seventh generation of home gaming consoles to appear within forty years, and each generation is accompanied by an immense international transportation of games hardware, software (in various storage formats) and peripherals. Obsolescence also occurs at the software or content level and is significant because the games industry as a creative industry is dependent on the extensive management of multiple intellectual properties. The computing and video games software industry operates a close partnership with the hardware industry, and as such, software obsolescence directly contributes to hardware obsolescence. The obsolescence of content and the redundancy of the methods of policing its scarcity in the marketplace has been accelerated and altered by the processes of disintermediation with a range of outcomes (Flew). The music industry is perhaps the most advanced in terms of disintermediation with digital distribution at the center of the conflict between the legitimate and unauthorised access to intellectual property. This points to one issue with the hypothesis that digital distribution can lead to a reduction in hardware obsolescence, as the marketplace leader and key online distributor of music, Apple, is also the major producer of new media technologies and devices that are the paragon of stylistic obsolescence. Stylistic obsolescence, in which fashion changes products across seasons of consumption, has long been observed as the dominant form of scaled industrial innovation (Slade). Stylistic obsolescence is differentiated from mechanical or technological obsolescence as the deliberate supersedence of products by more advanced designs, better production techniques and other minor innovations. The line between the stylistic and technological obsolescence is not always clear, especially as reduced durability has become a powerful market strategy (Fitzpatrick). This occurs where the design of technologies is subsumed within the discourses of manufacturing, consumption and the logic of planned obsolescence in which the product or parts are intended to fail, degrade or under perform over time. It is especially the case with signature new media technologies such as laptop computers, mobile phones and portable games devices. Gamers are as guilty as other consumer groups in contributing to e-waste as participants in the industry's cycles of planned obsolescence, but some of them complicate discussions over the future of obsolescence and e-waste. Many gamers actively work to forestall the obsolescence of their games: they invest time in the play of older games (“retrogaming”) they donate labor and creative energy to the production of user-generated content as a means of sustaining involvement in gaming communities; and they produce entirely new game experiences for other users, based on existing software and hardware modifications known as 'mods'. With Guitar Hero and other 'rhythm' games it would be easy to argue that the hardware components of this genre have only one future: as waste. Alternatively, we could consider the actual lifespan of these objects (including their impact as e-waste) and the roles they play in the performances and practices of communities of gamers. For example, the Elmo Guitar Hero controller mod, the Tesla coil Guitar Hero controller interface, the Rock Band Speak n' Spellbinder mashup, the multiple and almost sacrilegious Fender guitar hero mods, the Guitar Hero Portable Turntable Mod and MAKE magazine's Trumpet Hero all indicate a significant diversity of user innovation, community formation and individual investment in the post-retail life of computer and video game hardware. Obsolescence is not just a problem for the games industry but for the computing and electronics industries more broadly as direct contributors to the social and environmental cost of electrical waste and obsolete electrical equipment. Planned obsolescence has long been the experience of gamers and computer users, as the basis of a utopian mythology of upgrades (Dovey and Kennedy). For PC users the upgrade pathway is traversed by the consumption of further hardware and software post initial purchase in a cycle of endless consumption, acquisition and waste (as older parts are replaced and eventually discarded). The accumulation and disposal of these cultural artefacts does not devalue or accrue in space or time at the same rate (Straw) and many users will persist for years, gradually upgrading and delaying obsolescence and even perpetuate the circulation of older cultural commodities. Flea markets and secondhand fairs are popular sites for the purchase of new, recent, old, and recycled computer hardware, and peripherals. Such practices and parallel markets support the strategies of 'making do' described by De Certeau, but they also continue the cycle of upgrade and obsolescence, and they are still consumed as part of the promise of the 'new', and the desire of a purchase that will finally 'fix' the users' computer in a state of completion (29). The planned obsolescence of new media technologies is common, but its success is mixed; for example, support for Microsoft's operating system Windows XP was officially withdrawn in April 2009 (Robinson), but due to the popularity in low cost PC 'netbooks' outfitted with an optimised XP operating system and a less than enthusiastic response to the 'next generation' Windows Vista, XP continues to be popular. Digital Distribution: A Solution? Gamers may be able to reduce the accumulation of e-waste by supporting the disintermediation of the games retail sector by means of online distribution. Disintermediation is the establishment of a direct relationship between the creators of content and their consumers through products and services offered by content producers (Flew 201). The move to digital distribution has already begun to reduce the need to physically handle commodities, but this currently signals only further support of planned, stylistic and technological obsolescence, increasing the rate at which the commodities for recording, storing, distributing and exhibiting digital content become e-waste. Digital distribution is sometimes overlooked as a potential means for promoting communities of user practice dedicated to e-waste reduction, at the same time it is actively employed to reduce the potential for the unregulated appropriation of content and restrict post-purchase sales through Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. Distributors like Amazon.com continue to pursue commercial opportunities in linking the user to digital distribution of content via exclusive hardware and software technologies. The Amazon e-book reader, the Kindle, operates via a proprietary mobile network using a commercially run version of the wireless 3G protocols. The e-book reader is heavily encrypted with Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies and exclusive digital book formats designed to enforce current copyright restrictions and eliminate second-hand sales, lending, and further post-purchase distribution. The success of this mode of distribution is connected to Amazon's ability to tap both the mainstream market and the consumer demand for the less-than-popular; those books, movies, music and television series that may not have been 'hits' at the time of release. The desire to revisit forgotten niches, such as B-sides, comics, books, and older video games, suggests Chris Anderson, linked with so-called “long tail” economics. Recently Webb has queried the economic impact of the Long Tail as a business strategy, but does not deny the underlying dynamics, which suggest that content does not obsolesce in any straightforward way. Niche markets for older content are nourished by participatory cultures and Web 2.0 style online services. A good example of the Long Tail phenomenon is the recent case of the 1971 book A Lion Called Christian, by Anthony Burke and John Rendall, republished after the author's film of a visit to a resettled Christian in Africa was popularised on YouTube in 2008. Anderson's Long Tail theory suggests that over time a large number of items, each with unique rather than mass histories, will be subsumed as part of a larger community of consumers, including fans, collectors and everyday users with a long term interest in their use and preservation. If digital distribution platforms can reduce e-waste, they can perhaps be fostered by to ensuring digital consumers have access to morally and ethically aware consumer decisions, but also that they enjoy traditional consumer freedoms, such as the right to sell on and change or modify their property. For it is not only the fixation on the 'next generation' that contributes to obsolescence, but also technologies like DRM systems that discourage second hand sales and restrict modification. The legislative upgrades, patches and amendments to copyright law that have attempted to maintain the law's effectiveness in competing with peer-to-peer networks have supported DRM and other intellectual property enforcement technologies, despite the difficulties that owners of intellectual property have encountered with the effectiveness of DRM systems (Moore, Creative). The games industry continues to experiment with DRM, however, this industry also stands out as one of the few to have significantly incorporated the user within the official modes of production (Moore, Commonising). Is the games industry capable (or willing) of supporting a digital delivery system that attempts to minimise or even reverse software and hardware obsolescence? We can try to answer this question by looking in detail at the biggest digital distributor of PC games, Steam. Steam Figure 1: The Steam Application user interface retail section Steam is a digital distribution system designed for the Microsoft Windows operating system and operated by American video game development company and publisher, Valve Corporation. Steam combines online games retail, DRM technologies and internet-based distribution services with social networking and multiplayer features (in-game voice and text chat, user profiles, etc) and direct support for major games publishers, independent producers, and communities of user-contributors (modders). Steam, like the iTunes games store, Xbox Live and other digital distributors, provides consumers with direct digital downloads of new, recent and classic titles that can be accessed remotely by the user from any (internet equipped) location. Steam was first packaged with the physical distribution of Half Life 2 in 2004, and the platform's eventual popularity is tied to the success of that game franchise. Steam was not an optional component of the game's installation and many gamers protested in various online forums, while the platform was treated with suspicion by the global PC games press. It did not help that Steam was at launch everything that gamers take objection to: a persistent and initially 'buggy' piece of software that sits in the PC's operating system and occupies limited memory resources at the cost of hardware performance. Regular updates to the Steam software platform introduced social network features just as mainstream sites like MySpace and Facebook were emerging, and its popularity has undergone rapid subsequent growth. Steam now eclipses competitors with more than 20 million user accounts (Leahy) and Valve Corporation makes it publicly known that Steam collects large amounts of data about its users. This information is available via the public player profile in the community section of the Steam application. It includes the average number of hours the user plays per week, and can even indicate the difficulty the user has in navigating game obstacles. Valve reports on the number of users on Steam every two hours via its web site, with a population on average between one and two million simultaneous users (Valve, Steam). We know these users’ hardware profiles because Valve Corporation makes the results of its surveillance public knowledge via the Steam Hardware Survey. Valve’s hardware survey itself conceptualises obsolescence in two ways. First, it uses the results to define the 'cutting edge' of PC technologies and publishing the standards of its own high end production hardware on the companies blog. Second, the effect of the Survey is to subsequently define obsolescent hardware: for example, in the Survey results for April 2009, we can see that the slight majority of users maintain computers with two central processing units while a significant proportion (almost one third) of users still maintained much older PCs with a single CPU. Both effects of the Survey appear to be well understood by Valve: the Steam Hardware Survey automatically collects information about the community's computer hardware configurations and presents an aggregate picture of the stats on our web site. The survey helps us make better engineering and gameplay decisions, because it makes sure we're targeting machines our customers actually use, rather than measuring only against the hardware we've got in the office. We often get asked about the configuration of the machines we build around the office to do both game and Steam development. We also tend to turn over machines in the office pretty rapidly, at roughly every 18 months. (Valve, Team Fortress) Valve’s support of older hardware might counter perceptions that older PCs have no use and begins to reverse decades of opinion regarding planned and stylistic obsolescence in the PC hardware and software industries. Equally significant to the extension of the lives of older PCs is Steam's support for mods and its promotion of user generated content. By providing software for mod creation and distribution, Steam maximises what Postigo calls the development potential of fan-programmers. One of the 'payoffs' in the information/access exchange for the user with Steam is the degree to which Valve's End-User Licence Agreement (EULA) permits individuals and communities of 'modders' to appropriate its proprietary game content for use in the creation of new games and games materials for redistribution via Steam. These mods extend the play of the older games, by requiring their purchase via Steam in order for the individual user to participate in the modded experience. If Steam is able to encourage this kind of appropriation and community support for older content, then the potential exists for it to support cultures of consumption and practice of use that collaboratively maintain, extend, and prolong the life and use of games. Further, Steam incorporates the insights of “long tail” economics in a purely digital distribution model, in which the obsolescence of 'non-hit' game titles can be dramatically overturned. Published in November 2007, Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) by Epic Games, was unappreciated in a market saturated with games in the first-person shooter genre. Epic republished UT3 on Steam 18 months later, making the game available to play for free for one weekend, followed by discounted access to new content. The 2000 per cent increase in players over the game's 'free' trial weekend, has translated into enough sales of the game for Epic to no longer consider the release a commercial failure: It’s an incredible precedent to set: making a game a success almost 18 months after a poor launch. It’s something that could only have happened now, and with a system like Steam...Something that silently updates a purchase with patches and extra content automatically, so you don’t have to make the decision to seek out some exciting new feature: it’s just there anyway. Something that, if you don’t already own it, advertises that game to you at an agreeably reduced price whenever it loads. Something that enjoys a vast community who are in turn plugged into a sea of smaller relevant communities. It’s incredibly sinister. It’s also incredibly exciting... (Meer) Clearly concerns exist about Steam's user privacy policy, but this also invites us to the think about the economic relationship between gamers and games companies as it is reconfigured through the private contractual relationship established by the EULA which accompanies the digital distribution model. The games industry has established contractual and licensing arrangements with its consumer base in order to support and reincorporate emerging trends in user generated cultures and other cultural formations within its official modes of production (Moore, "Commonising"). When we consider that Valve gets to tax sales of its virtual goods and can further sell the information farmed from its users to hardware manufacturers, it is reasonable to consider the relationship between the corporation and its gamers as exploitative. Gabe Newell, the Valve co-founder and managing director, conversely believes that people are willing to give up personal information if they feel it is being used to get better services (Leahy). If that sentiment is correct then consumers may be willing to further trade for services that can reduce obsolescence and begin to address the problems of e-waste from the ground up. Conclusion Clearly, there is a potential for digital distribution to be a means of not only eliminating the need to physically transport commodities but also supporting consumer practices that further reduce e-waste. For an industry where only a small proportion of the games made break even, the successful relaunch of older games content indicates Steam's capacity to ameliorate software obsolescence. Digital distribution extends the use of commercially released games by providing disintermediated access to older and user-generated content. For Valve, this occurs within a network of exchange as access to user-generated content, social networking services, and support for the organisation and coordination of communities of gamers is traded for user-information and repeat business. Evidence for whether this will actively translate to an equivalent decrease in the obsolescence of game hardware might be observed with indicators like the Steam Hardware Survey in the future. The degree of potential offered by digital distribution is disrupted by a range of technical, commercial and legal hurdles, primary of which is the deployment of DRM, as part of a range of techniques designed to limit consumer behaviour post purchase. While intervention in the form of legislation and radical change to the insidious nature of electronics production is crucial in order to achieve long term reduction in e-waste, the user is currently considered only in terms of 'ethical' consumption and ultimately divested of responsibility through participation in corporate, state and civil recycling and e-waste management operations. The message is either 'careful what you purchase' or 'careful how you throw it away' and, like DRM, ignores the connections between product, producer and user and the consumer support for environmentally, ethically and socially positive production, distribrution, disposal and recycling. This article, has adopted a different strategy, one that sees digital distribution platforms like Steam, as capable, if not currently active, in supporting community practices that should be seriously considered in conjunction with a range of approaches to the challenge of obsolescence and e-waste. References Anderson, Chris. "The Long Tail." Wired Magazine 12. 10 (2004). 20 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html›. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Dovey, Jon, and Helen Kennedy. Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. London: Open University Press,2006. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. The Anxiety of Obsolescence. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2008. Flew, Terry. New Media: An Introduction. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2008. Leahy, Brian. "Live Blog: DICE 2009 Keynote - Gabe Newell, Valve Software." The Feed. G4TV 18 Feb. 2009. 16 Apr. 2009 ‹http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/Live-Blog-DICE-2009-Keynote-–-Gabe-Newell-Valve-Software.html›. Meer, Alec. "Unreal Tournament 3 and the New Lazarus Effect." Rock, Paper, Shotgun 16 Mar. 2009. 24 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/03/16/unreal-tournament-3-and-the-new-lazarus-effect/›.Moore, Christopher. "Commonising the Enclosure: Online Games and Reforming Intellectual Property Regimes." Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society 3. 2, (2005). 12 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.swin.edu.au/sbs/ajets/journal/issue5-V3N2/abstract_moore.htm›. Moore, Christopher. "Creative Choices: Changes to Australian Copyright Law and the Future of the Public Domain." Media International Australia 114 (Feb. 2005): 71–83. Postigo, Hector. "Of Mods and Modders: Chasing Down the Value of Fan-Based Digital Game Modification." Games and Culture 2 (2007): 300-13. Robinson, Daniel. "Windows XP Support Runs Out Next Week." PC Business Authority 8 Apr. 2009. 16 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/142013,windows-xp-support-runs-out-next-week.aspx›. Straw, Will. "Exhausted Commodities: The Material Culture of Music." Canadian Journal of Communication 25.1 (2000): 175. Slade, Giles. Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. Valve. "Steam and Game Stats." 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://store.steampowered.com/stats/›. Valve. "Team Fortress 2: The Scout Update." Steam Marketing Message 20 Feb. 2009. 12 Apr. 2009 ‹http://storefront.steampowered.com/Steam/Marketing/message/2269/›. Webb, Richard. "Online Shopping and the Harry Potter Effect." New Scientist 2687 (2008): 52-55. 16 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026873.300-online-shopping-and-the-harry-potter-effect.html?page=2›. With thanks to Dr Nicola Evans and Dr Frances Steel for their feedback and comments on drafts of this paper.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Cute pictures of animals feature as an inoffensive and adorable background to the contemporary online experience with cute content regularly shared on social media platforms. Indeed the demand for cuteness is so strong in the current cultural milieu that some animals become recognisable animal celebrities in the process (Hepola). However, despite the existence of this professionalisation in some sections of the cute economy, amateurs produce the majority of cute content that circulates online. This is largely because one of the central contributors to this steady stream of cute animal pictures is the subforum Aww, hosted on the online community Reddit. Aww is wholly dedicated to pictures of cute things and allows users to directly submit cute content directly to the site. Aww is one of the default subforums that new Reddit users are automatically subscribed to and is immensely popular, featuring over 4.2 million dedicated subscribers as well as untold casual visits. The section is self-described as: “Things that make you go AWW! -- like puppies, and bunnies, and so on...Feel free to post pictures, videos and stories of cute things” ("The cutest things on the internet!"). Users upload cute animal photos that they have taken and wait for the Reddit community to vote on their favourite pictures. The voting mechanism helps users to acknowledge their favourite posts, with the most popular featured on the front page of Aww (for a detailed critique of this process see van der Nagel 2013). The user-generated model of the site means that instead of visitors being confronted with a formally curated selection of cute animal photos, Aww offers a constantly changing mixture of amateur, semi-pro and professional content. Aww - and Reddit more generally - stand as an emblematic example of participatory culture (Jenkins 2006), with users playing an active role in the production and curation of online content. However, given the commercial nature of many user-generated content sites, this amateur media activity is becoming increasingly subject to intellectual property claims and conflicts (see Burgess; Kennedy). Across the internet there are growing tensions between website operators and amateur producers. As Jenny Kennedy (132) notes, while these platforms promote a public rhetoric of “sharing”, these corporate narratives “downplay their economic power” and imply “that they do not control the practices contained within their sites”. Subsequently, the expectations of users regarding how content is managed and organised can differ substantially from the corporate goals of social media companies. This paper contributes to the growing body of literature interested in the politics of amateur media production (see Hunter and Lastowka; Benkler; Burgess; Kennedy) by exploring the emergence of attribution norms and informal enforcement measures in and around the Aww online community. In contrast to professional content creators, amateurs often have fewer resources on hand to protect their copyrighted work and are also challenged by a pervasive online rhetoric that suggests that popular content essentially “belongs to the Internet” (Douglas). A number of communities on Reddit have questioned the company’s handling of amateur content with users suggesting that Reddit actively seeks to de-contextualise original content and not attribute original creators. By examining how amateur creators and online communities regulate content online, I interrogate the power relations that exist between social media platforms and users and explore how the corporate rhetoric of participatory culture interacts with the legal framework of copyright law. This article also contributes to existing legal scholarship on communities of practice and norms-based intellectual property systems. This literature has explored how social norms effectively regulate the protection of, among other things, recipes (Fauchart and Von Hippel), fashion design (Raustiala and Sprigman) and stand-up comedy routines (Oliar and Sprigman), in situations where copyright law does not function as an effective regulatory mechanism. Often these norms are in line with copyright law protections, but in other cases they diverge from these legal principles. In this paper I suggest that particular sections of Reddit function in a similar way, with their own set of self-governing norms, and that these norms largely align with the philosophical aims of copyright law. The paper begins by outlining a series of recent debates that have occurred between amateur media creators and Reddit, before exploring how norms are regulated on Reddit subforums Aww and Karma Court. I then offer some brief conclusions on the value of paying attention to how social norms structure forms of “sharing” (see Kennedy) and provide a useful way for amateur media producers to protect their content without going through formal legal processes. Introducing Reddit and the Confused Politics of Amateur Content Reddit is a social news site, a vibrant community and one of the most popular websites online. It stands as the most visible iteration of a long-standing tradition of user-generated and managed news, one that goes back to websites like Slashdot, which operated in the mid to late-90s. Founded in 2005 Reddit was launched after only one funding round of venture capital, receiving $100k in seed funding from Y Combinatory (Miller). Despite some early rivalry between Reddit and competitor site Digg, Reddit had enough potential to be purchased by Condé Nast for an estimated $20 million (Carr). Reddit’s audience numbers have grown exponentially in the last few years, with the site currently receiving over 5 billion page views and 114 million unique visitors per month (“About Reddit”). It has also changed focus significantly in the last few years with the site now “as much about posting interesting or funny pictures as it is about news” (Sepponen). Reddit hosts a number of individual subforums (called subreddits), which focus on a particular topic and function essentially like online bulletin boards. The front-page of Reddit showcases the most popular content from across the whole website, and user-generated content features heavily here. Amateur media cannot spread without the structural support of social media platforms, but this support is qualified in particular ways. Reddit stands as a paradigmatic case. Users on Reddit are “incentivized to submit direct links to images, because viewers can get to them more easily” (Douglas) and the website encourages amateur creators to use a preferred content server – Imgur – to host images. The Imgur service provides a direct public link to an image – even bypassing the Reddit discussion page – and with its free hosting and limited ads it has become a popular service and is used by most Reddit users (Slater-Robins). For the majority of Reddit users this is an unproblematic partnership. Imgur is free, effective and fast. However, a vocal minority of Reddit users and amateur creators claim that the partnership between Reddit and Imgur has created the equivalent of an online ghetto (Douglas).As Nick Douglas explains, when using services like Imgur there is no requirement to either provide an external link to a creators website or to attribute the creator, limiting the ability for an amateur creator to gain exposure. It also bypasses existing revenue streams that may have been set up by creators, including ad-supported websites or online stores offering merchandise. As a result creators have little opportunity to benefit either economically or reputationally from this system. This occurs to such an extent that “there are actually warnings against submitting your own [original] work” to particular subforums on Reddit (Douglas). For example, some forum moderators require submissions to either “link directly to a specific image file or to a website with minimal ads” (“Reddit Pics”). It is in this context, that the posting of original content without attribution is not actively policed. There are a number of complaints circulating within the Reddit community about these practices (see “Ok, look people. I know you heart Imgur, but webcomics? Just link to the freaking site”; “The problem with reddit”). Many creators have directly protested against this aspect of Reddit’s structural organisation. Blogger Benjamin Grelle (a.k.a The Frogman) and writer Chris Menning are two notable examples. Grelle’s protest was witty and dramatic. He wrote a blog post featuring a picture of an email he sent to Imgur offering the company a choice: send him a huge novelty check for $10,000 or alternatively, add a proper attribution system that allows artists, photographers and content creators to properly credit their work. Grelle estimates that his work generated around $20,000 in ad revenue for Imgur; however the structure of Reddit and Imgur meant he earned little income from the “viral” success of his content. Grelle claimed he was happy for his work to be shared, but attribution meant that it was more likely a fan would follow the link to his website and provide him with some financial recompense for his work. Unsurprisingly, Grelle didn’t receive a paycheck and so in response has developed a unique way to gain exposure. He has started to insert himself into his work, “[s]o when you see a stolen Frogman piece, you still see Ben Grelle’s face” (Douglas). Chris Menning posted a blog about being banned from Reddit, hoping to bring to light some of the inequalities that persist around Reddit’s current structure. He began by noting that he had received a significant amount of traffic from them in the past. He had responded in kind by looking to create original content for particular subforums, knowing what a particular community would enjoy. However, his habit of providing the link to his own website along with the content he posted saw him get labelled as a spammer and banned by administrators. Menning chose not to fight the ban:It seems that the only way I could avoid [getting banned] is if I were to relinquish any rights to my original content and post it exclusively to Imgur. In effect, reddit punishes the creation of original content, and rewards content theft (Menning). Instead he decided to quit Reddit, claiming that Reddit’s approach would carry long-term consequences as the platform provided little incentive for creators to produce wholly original content. It is worth noting that neither Menning nor Grelle turned to legal avenues in order to gain financial restitution. Considering the nature of the practices they were complaining about, compensation in the form of an injunction or damages would have certainly been possible. In Benjamin’s case, a user had combined a number of his copyrighted works into one image and posted the image to Imgur without attribution --this infringed Grelle’s copyright in his work as well as his moral right to be attributed as the creator of the work. However, the public comments of both creators suggest that despite the possibility of legal success, their issue was not so much to do with their individual cases but rather the broader structural issues at play within Reddit. While they might gain individually from a successful legal challenge, over the long term Reddit would continue to be a fraught place for amateur and semi-professional content creators. Certain parts of the Reddit community appear to be sympathetic to these issues, and the complaints of dissenting users like Menning and Grelle have received active support from some users and moderators on the site. This has led to changes in the way content is being posted and managed on Aww, and has also driven the emergence of a satirical user-run court entitled Karma Court. In these spaces moderators and members establish community norms, regularly police the correct attribution of works and challenge the de-contextualisation of content overtly encouraged by Reddit, Imgur and other subforums. In the following section I will examine both Aww and Karma Court in order to explore how these norms are established and negotiated by both moderators and users alike. reddit.com/r/aww: The Online Hub of Cute Animal Pictures As we have seen, the design of Reddit and Imgur creates a number of problems for amateur creators who wish to protect their intellectual property. To address these shortcomings, the Aww community has created its own informal regulatory systems. Volunteer moderators play a crucial role: they establish informal codes of conduct for the Aww community and enforce various rules about how the site should be used. One of these rules relates to attribution. Users are asked to to “post original content whenever possible or attribute original content creators” ("The cutest things on the internet!"). Due to the volunteer nature of the work and the size of the Aww sub-reddit, moderator enforcement is haphazard. Consequently, responsibility falls on the wider user community to self-police. Despite its informal nature, this process manages to facilitate a fairly consistent standard of attribution. In this way it functions as an informal method of intellectual property protection. It is worth noting however that this commitment to original content is not solely due to the moral character of Aww users. A significant motivation is the distribution of karma points amongst Reddit users. Karma, which represents your good standing within the Reddit community, can be earned through user likes and votes – these push the most popular content to the front page of each subforum. Thus karma stands as a numerical representation of a user’s value to Reddit. This ostensibly democratic system has the paradoxical effect of fuelling intellectual property violations on the site. Users often repost other users’ jpegs, animated gifs, and other content, in order to reap the social and cultural capital that comes with posting a popular picture. In some cases they claim authorship of the content; in other cases they simply re-post content that they feel “belongs to the internet” (Douglas). Some content is so popular or pervasive online (this content that is often described as “viral”) that users feel there is little reason or need to attribute content. This helps to explain the persistence of ownership and attribution conflicts on Reddit. In the eyes of some users and moderators the management of these rights and the correct distribution of karma are seen to be vital to the long-term functioning of site. The karma system offers a numerical representation of each contributor’s value. Re-posting already successful content and claiming it as your own challenges the proper functioning of the karma system and potentially ‘inhibits the innovative potential of contributions (Richterich). On Aww the re-posting of original content is viewed as a taboo act that breaches these norms. The poster is seen to have engaged in deceptive conduct in order to gain karma for their user profile. In addition there is a strong ethic that runs through these comment threads that the original creator deserves attribution. There is a presumption that this attribution is vital in order to increasing the possible marketability of the posted content and to recognise and courage creators within the community. This sort of community-driven regulation contrasts with the aforementioned site design of Reddit and Imgur, which frustrates effective authorship attribution practices. Aww users, in contrast, have shown a willingness to defend what they see as the intellectual property rights of content creators.A series of recent examples outline how this process works in practice. User “moonlikeme123” posted a picture of a cat with its hands on the steering wheel of a car. The picture was entitled “we don’t need to ask for directions, Helen”. During the same day, three separate users had identified the picture as a repost, with one noting that the same picture was already on the front page of Aww. “moonlikeme123” received no karma points for the picture. In a second example, the user “nibblur” posted a photo of a kitten “hunting” a toy mouse. Within a day, one enterprising user had identified the original photographer – “torode”, an amateur photographer – and linked to his Reddit profile (see fig. 2) ("ferocious cat hunting its prey: aww."). One further example: on 15 July 2013 “Cuzacelmare” posted a picture of two dogs comforting each other – an image which had originally been posted by “lauface”. Again, users were quick to point out the lack of attribution and the attempt to claim someone else’s content as their own (“Comforting her sister during a storm: aww). It is worth noting that some Reddit users consider attributing content to be entirely without benefit. Some deride karma as “meaningless” and suggest that as a significant amount of content online is regularly reposted elsewhere, there is little harm done in re-posting what is essentially amateur content destined to be lost in the bowels of the internet. For example, the comments that follow Cuzacelmare’s reflect an ambivalence about reposting, suggesting that users weigh up the benefits of exposure gained by the re-posting against the lack of attribution granted and the increasingly decontextualized nature of the photo itself:Why does everyone get so bitchy about reposts. Not everyone is on ALL the time or has been on Rreddit since it was created. I mean if you've seen it already ignore it. It's just picture you aren't forced to click the link. [sic] (“Comforting her sister during a storm: aww”)We're arguing semantics, but any content that gets attention can benefit the creator, whether it's reddit or Youtube (“Comforting her sister during a storm: aww”) Such discussions are common on comment threads following re-posts by other users. They underline the conflicted status of this ephemeral media and the underlying frictions that are part of these processes. These discussions underline the fact that on Reddit the “sharing” (Kennedy) and “spreading” (Jenkins et al.) of content is not seen as an unquestioned positive but rather as a contestable structural feature that needs to be constantly negotiated and discussed. These informal methods of identification, post-hoc attribution and criticism in comment threads have been the long-standing method used to redress questions of attribution and ownership of content on Reddit. However in recent times, Reddit users have turned to satirical methods of formal adjudication for particularly egregious cases. A sub-reddit, Karma Court, now functions as an informal tribunal in which punishment is meted out for “the abuse of karma and general contemptible actions heretofore identified as wrongdoing” (“Constitution and F.A.Q of the Karma Court”). Due to its double function as both an adjudicator and satire of users overly-invested in online debates, there is no limit to the possible “crimes” a user may be charged with. The following charges are only presented as guidelines and speak to common negative experiences on online: (1). Douchebaggery - When one is being a douche.(2). Defamation - Tarnishing another redditor's [user’s] username.(3). Public Indecency - When a user flexes his or her 'e-peen' with the intent to shame other users.(4). Ohsh*t.exe - Intentional reposting that results in reddit Gold.(5). GrandTheft.jpg - Reposting while claiming credit for the post.(6). Obstruction of Justice - Impeding or interfering with an investigation, such as submitting false screenshots, deleting evidence, or providing false evidence to the court.(7). Other - Literally anything else you want. We like creative names for charges.(“Constitution and F.A.Q of the Karma Court”) In Karma Court, legal representation can be sourced from a list of attorneys and judges, populated by users who volunteer to help adjudicate the case. They are required to have been a Reddit member for over six months. The only punishment is a public shaming. Interestingly Karma Court has developed a fair reposting clause that attempts to manage the complex debates around reposting and attribution. Under the non-binding satirical clause, users are able to repost content if it has not featured on the front page of a sub-reddit for seven or more days, if the re-poster acknowledges in the title or description that they are re-posting or if the original poster has less than 30,000 link karma (which means that the original poster has not substantially contributed to the Reddit community). If a re-poster does not adhere by these rules and claims a re-post as their own original content (or “OC”), they can be charged with “grandtheft.jpg” and brought to trial by another Reddit user. As one of the most popular subforums, a number of cases have emerged from Aww. The aforementioned re-poster “Cuzacelmare” (“I am bringing /U/ Cuzacelmare to trial …”) was “charged” through this process and served with a summons after denying “cute and innocent animals of that subreddit of their much deserved karma”. Similar cases to do with re-posting without attribution on Aww involve “FreshCorio” (“Reddit vs. U/FreshCorio …”) and “ninjacollin” (“People of Reddit vs. /U/ ninjacollin”) who were also brought to karma court. In each case prosecutors were adamant that false authorship claims needed to be punished. With these mock trials run by volunteers it takes time for arguments to be heard and judgment to occur; however “ninjacollin” expedited the legal process by offering a full confession. As a new user, “ninjacollin” was reprimanded severely for his actions and the users on Karma Court underlined the consequences of not identifying original content creators when re-posting content. Ownership and Attribution: Amateur Media, Distribution and Law The practices outlined above offer a number of alternate ways to think about amateur media and how it is distributed. An increasingly complex picture of content attribution and circulation emerges once we take into account the structural operation of Reddit, the intellectual property norms of users, and the various formal and informal systems of regulation that are appearing on the site. Such practices require users to negotiate complex questions of ownership between each other and in relation to corporate bodies. These negotiations often lead to informal agreements around a set of norms to regulate the spread of content within a particular community, suggesting that the lack of a formal legal process in these debates does not mean that there is an absence of regulation. As noted throughout this paper, the spread of online content often involves progressive de-contextualisation. Website design features often support this process in the hopes of encouraging content to spread in a fashion amenable to their corporate goals. Considering this tendency for content to be decontextualized online, the presence of attribution norms on subforums like Aww is significant. Instead of remixing, spreading and re-purposing content indiscriminately, users retain a concept of ownership and attribution that tracks closely to the basic principles of copyright law. Rather than users radically redefining concepts of attribution and ownership, as prefigured in some of the more utopian accounts of participatory media, the dominant norms of the Reddit community extend a discourse of copyright and ownership. As well as providing a greater level of detail to contemporary debates around amateur media and its viral or spreadable nature (Burgess; Jenkins; Jenkins et al), this analysis offers some lessons for copyright law. The emergence of norms in particular Reddit subforums which govern the use of copyrighted content and the use of a mock court structure suggests that online communities have the capacity to engage in forms of redress for amateur creators. These organic forms of copyright management operate adjacent to formal legal structures of copyright law. However, they are more accessible and practical for amateur creators, who do not always have the money to hire lawyers, especially when the market value of their content might be negligible. The informal regulatory systems outlined above may not operate perfectly but they reveal communities who are willing to engage foundational conversations around the importance of attribution and ownership. Following the existing literature (Fauchart and Von Hippel; Raustiala and Sprigman; Schultz; Oliar and Sprigman), I suggest that these online social norms provide a useful form of alternative protection for amateur creators. Acknowledgements Thanks to Ramon Lobato and Emily van der Nagel for comments and productive discussions around these issues. I am also grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their assistance in developing this argument. References “About Reddit.” Reddit, 2014. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.reddit.com/about/›. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Burgess, Jean. “YouTube and the Formalisation of Amateur Media.” Amateur Media: Social, Cultural and Legal Perspectives. In Dan Hunter, Ramon Lobato, Megan Richardson, and Julian Thomas, eds. Oxford: Routledge, 2012. Carr, Nicholas. “Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars.” The New York Times: Business, 2 Sep. 2012. “Comforting Her Sister during a Storm: aww.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 15 July 2013. “Constitution and F.A.Q of the Karma Court.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 2014. Douglas, Nick. “Everything on the Internet Gets Stolen: Here’s How You Should Feel about That.” Slacktory, 8 Sep. 2009. Fauchart, Emmanual, and Eric von Hippel. “Norms-Based Intellectual Property Systems: The Case of French Chefs.” Organization Science 19.2 (2008): 187 - 201 "Ferocious Cat Hunting Its Prey: aww." reddit: the front page of the internet, 4 April 2013. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.rreddit.com/r/aww/comments/1bobcp/ferocious_cat_hunting_its_prey/›. Hepola, Sarah. “The Internet is Made of Kittens.” Salon.com, 11 Feb. 2009. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.salon.com/2009/02/10/cat_internet/›. Hunter, Dan, and Greg Lastowka. “Amateur-to-Amateur.” William & Mary Law Review 46 (2004): 951 - 1030. “I Am Bringing /U/ Cuzacelmare to Trial on the Basis of Being One of the Biggest _______ I’ve Ever Seen, by Reposting Cute Animal Pictures to /R/Awww. Feels.Jpg.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 21 March 2013. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Menning, Chris. "So I Got Banned from Reddit" Modern Primate, 23 Aug. 2012. Miller, Keery. “How Y Combinator Helped Shape Reddit.” Bloomberg Businessweek, 26 Sep. 2007. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-09-26/how-y-combinator-helped-shape-redditbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice›. “Ok, Look People. I Know You Heart Imgur, But Webcomics? Just Link to the Freaking Site.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 22 Aug. 2011. Oliar, Dotan, and Christopher Sprigman. “There’s No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy.” Virginia Law Review 94.8 (2009): 1787 – 1867. “People of reddit vs. /U/Ninjacollin for Grandtheft.jpg.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 30 Jan. 2013. Raustiala, Kal, and Christopher Sprigman. “The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design”. Virginia Law Review 92.8 (2006): 1687-1777. “Reddit v. U/FreshCorio. User Uploads Popular Repost Picture of R/AWW and Claims It Is His Sister’s Cat. Falsely Claims It Is His Cakeday for Good Measure.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 12 Apr. 2013. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.reddit.com/r/KarmaCourt/comments/1c7vxz/reddit_vs_ufreshcorio_user_uploads_popular_repost/›. “Reddit Pics.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 2014. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/›. Richterich, Annika. “’Karma, Precious Karma!’ Karmawhoring on Reddit and the Front Page’s Econometrisation.” Journal of Peer Production 4 (2014). 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-4-value-and-currency/peer-reviewed-articles/karma-precious-karma/›. Schultz, Mark. “Fear and Norms and Rock & Roll: What Jambands Can Teach Us about Persuading People to Obey Copyright Law.” Berkley Technology Law Journal 21.2 (2006): 651 – 728. Sepponen, Bemmu. “Why Redditors Gave Imgur a Chance.” Social Media Today, 20 July 2011. Slater-Robins, Max. “From Rags to Riches: The Story of Imgur.” Neowin, 21 Apr. 2013. "The Cutest Things on the Internet!" reddit: the front page of the internet, n.d. “The Problem with reddit.” reddit: the front page of the internet, 23 Aug. 2012. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.rreddit.com/r/technology/comments/ypbe2/the_problem_with_rreddit/›. Van der Nagel, Emily. “Faceless Bodies: Negotiating Technological and Cultural Codes on reddit gonewild.” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture 10.2 (2013). "We Don’t Need to Ask for Directions, Helen: aww." reddit: the front page of the internet, 30 June 2013. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.rreddit.com/r/aww/comments/1heut6/we_dont_need_to_ask_for_directions_helen/›.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction This year, 2008, marks the tenth anniversary of the portable MP3 player. MPMan F10, the first such device to utilise the MP3-encoding format, was launched in March 1998 (Smith). However it was not until April 2003 when Apple Inc launched the iPod that the market began the massive growth that has made the devices almost ubiquitous in everyday life. In 2006 iPods were rated as more popular than beer amongst college students in the United States, according to Student Monitor. Beer had only previously surpassed in popularity once before, in 1997, by the Internet (Zeff). This year will also see the launch in Australia of the latest offering in this line of products – the iPhone – which incorporates the popular MP3 player in an advanced mobile phone. The iPhone features a touch-sensitive flat screen that serves as the interface for its operating system. While the design is striking, it also generates accessibility problems. There are obvious implications for those with vision impairments when there are no physical markers to point towards the phone’s functions (Crichton). This article critically examines the promise of Internet-based digital technology to open up the world to people with disabilities, and the parallel danger that the social construction of disability in the digital environment will simply come to mirror pre-existing analogue discrimination. This paper explores how technologies and innovations designed to improve access by the disabled actually enhance access for all users. The first part of the paper focuses on ‘Web 2.0’ and digital access for people with disability, particularly those with vision impairment. The online software that drives the iPod and iPhone and exclusively delivers content to these devices is iTunes. While iTunes seems on the surface to provide enormous opportunity for the vision impaired to access a broad selection of audio content, its design actually works to inhibit access to the platform for this group. Apple promotes the use of iTunes in educational settings through the iTunes U channel, and this potentially excludes those who have difficulty with access to the technology. Critically, it is these excluded people who, potentially, could benefit the most from the new technology. We consider the difficulty experienced by users of screen readers and braille tablets in relation to iTunes and highlight the potential problems for universities who seek to utilise iTunes U. In the second part of the paper we reframe disability accessibility as a principle of universal access and design and outline how changes made to assist users with disability can enhance the learning experience of all students using the Lectopia lecture recording and distribution system as an example. The third section of the paper situates these digital developments within the continuum of disability theory deploying Finkelstein’s three stages of disability development. The focus then shifts to the potential of online virtual worlds such as Second Life to act as a place where the promise of technology to mediate for disability might be realised. Goggin and Newell suggest that the Internet will not be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. This article argues that accessibility must be addressed through the context of design and shared open standards for digital platforms. Web 2.0 and Accessibility The World Wide Web based its successful development on a set of common standards that worked across different software and operating systems. This interoperability held out great opportunity for the implementation of enabling software for those with disability, particularly sight and hearing impairments. The increasing sophistication and diversification of online content has confounded this initial promise. Websites have become more complex, particularly with the rise of ‘Web 2.0’ and the associated trends in coding and website design. This has aggravated attempts to mediate this content for a disabled audience through software (Zajicek). As Wood notes, ‘these days many computers are used principally to access the Internet – and there is no telling what a blind person will encounter there’. As the content requiring translation – either from text into audio or onto a braille tablet, or from audio into text captions – become less standardised and more complex, it becomes both harder for software to act as a translator, and harder to navigate this media once translated. This is particularly the case when links are generated ‘on the fly’ for each view of a website and where images replace words as hyperlinks. These problems can trace their origin to before the development of the World Wide Web. Reihing, addressing another Apple product in 1987 notes: The Apple Macintosh is particularly hard to use because it depends heavily on graphics. Some word processors ‘paint’ pictures of letters on the screen instead of using standard computer codes, and speech or braille devices can’t cope (in Goggin and Newell). Web 2.0 sites loaded with Ajax and other forms of Java scripting present a particular challenge for translation software (Zajicek). iTunes, an iconic Web 2.0 application, is a further step away from easily translated content as proprietary software that while operating though the Internet, does not conform to Web standards. Many translation software packages are unable to read the iTunes software at all or are limited and only able to read part of the page, but not enough of it to use the program (Furendal). As websites utilising ‘Web 2.0’ technology increase in popularity they become less attractive to users who are visually impaired, particularly because the dynamic elements can not be accessed using screen readers provided with the operating system (Bigham, Prince and Ladner). While at one level this presents an inability for a user with a disability to engage with the popular software, it also meant that universities seeking to use iTunes U to deliver content were excluding these students. To Apple’s credit they have taken some of these access concerns on board with the recent release of both the Apple operating system and iTunes, to better enable Apple’s own access software to translate the iTunes screen for blind users. However this also illustrates the problems with this type of software operating outside of nominated standards as there are still serious problems with access to iTunes on Microsoft’s dominant Windows operating system (Furendal). While Widows provides its own integrated screen reading software, the company acknowledges that this is not sufficiently powerful for regular use by disabled users who will need to use more specialised programs (Wood). The recent upgrade of the standard Windows operating system from XP to Vista seems to have abandoned the previous stipulation that there was a keyboard shortcut for each operation the system performed – a key requirement for those unable to use a visual interface on the screen to ‘point and click’ with a mouse (Wood). Other factors, such as the push towards iTunes U, explored in the next section, explain the importance of digital accessibility for everyone, not just the disabled as this technology becomes ubiquitous. The use of Lectopia in higher education demonstrates the value of flexibility of delivery to the whole student population, inclusive of the disabled. iPods and Higher Education iTunes is the enabling software supporting the iPod and iPhone. As well as commercial content, iTunes also acts as a distribution medium for other content that is free to use. It allows individuals or organisations to record and publish audio and video files – podcasts and vodcasts – that can be automatically downloaded from the Internet and onto individual computers and iPods as they become available. Significantly this technology has provided opportunities for educational use. iTunes U has been developed by Apple to facilitate the delivery of content from universities through the service. While Apple has acknowledged that this is, in part, a deliberate effort to drive the uptake of iTunes (Udell), there are particular opportunities for the distribution of information through this channel afforded by the technology. Duke University in the United States was an early adopter, distributing iPods to each of its first-year students for educational use as early as 2004 (Dean). A recent study of students at The University of Western Australia (UWA) by Williams and Fardon found that students who listen to lectures through portable media players such as iPods (the ‘Pod’ in iPod stands for ‘portable on demand’) have a higher attendance rate at lectures than those who do not. In 1998, the same year that the first portable MP3 player was being launched, the Lectopia (or iLecture) lecture recording and distribution system was introduced in Australia at UWA to enable students with disabilities better access to lecture materials. While there have been significant criticisms of this platform (Brabazon), the broad uptake and popularity of this technology, both at UWA and at many universities across Australia, demonstrates how changes made to assist disability can potentially help the broader community. This underpins the concept of ‘universal design’ where consideration given to people with disability also improves the lives of people without disability. A report by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, examined the accessibility of digital technology. Disability issues, such as access to digital content, were reframed as universal design issues: Disability accessibility issues are more accurately perceived in many cases as universal access issues, such that appropriate design for access by people with disabilities will improve accessibility and usability for … the community more generally. The idea of universal access was integral to Tim Berners-Lee’s original conception of the Web – however the platform has developed into a more complex and less ordered environment that can stray from agreed standards (Edwards, "Stop"). iTunes comes with its own accessibility issues. Furendal demonstrated that its design has added utility for some impairments notably dyslexia and colour blindness. However, as noted above, iTunes is highly problematic for those with other vision impairment particularly the blind. It is an example of the condition noted by Regan: There exists a false perception among designers that accessibility represents a restriction on creativity. There are few examples that exist in the world that can dissuade designers of this notion. While there are no technical reasons for this division between accessibility and design, the notion exists just the same. The invisibility of this issue confirms that while an awareness of differing abilities can assist all users, this blinkered approach to diverse visual acuities is not only blocking social justice imperatives but future marketing opportunities. The iPhone is notable for problems associated with use by people with disabilities, particularly people with hearing (Keizer) and vision impairments (Crichton). In colder climates the fact that the screen would not be activated by a gloved hand has also been a problem, its design reflects bias against not just the physically impaired. Design decisions reflect the socially constructed nature of disability where disability is related to how humans have chosen to construct the world (Finkelstein ,"To Deny"). Disability Theory and Technology Nora Groce conducted an anthropological study of Martha’s Vineyard in the United States. During the nineteenth century the island had an unusually high incidence of deafness. In response to this everyone on the island was able to communicate in sign language, regardless of the hearing capability, as a standard mode of communication. As a result the impairment of deafness did not become a disability in relation to communication. Society on the island was constructed to be inclusive without regard to a person’s hearing ability. Finkelstein (Attitudes) identified three stages of disability ‘creation’ to suggest disability (as it is defined socially) can be eradicated through technology. He is confident that the third phase, which he argues has been occurring in conjunction with the information age, will offset many of the prejudicial attitudes established during the second phase that he characterised as the industrial era. Digital technologies are often presented as a way to eradicate disability as it is socially constructed. Discussions around the Web and the benefits for people with disability usually centre on accessibility and social interaction. Digital documents on the Internet enable people with disability greater access than physical spaces, such as libraries, especially for the visually impaired who are able to make use of screen readers. There are more than 38 million blind people who utilise screen reading technology to access the Web (Bigham, Prince and Ladner). A visually impaired person is able to access digital texts whereas traditional, analogue, books remain inaccessible. The Web also allows people with disability to interact with others in a way that is not usually possible in general society. In a similar fashion to arguments that the Web is both gender and race neutral, people with disability need not identify as disabled in online spaces and can instead be judged on their personality first. In this way disability is not always a factor in the social encounter. These arguments however fail to address several factors integral to the social construction of disability. While the idea that a visually impaired person can access books electronically, in conjunction with a screen reader, sounds like a disability-free utopia, this is not always the case as ‘digital’ does not always mean ‘accessible’. Often digital documents will be in an image format that cannot be read by the user’s screen reader and will need to be converted and corrected by a sighted person. Sapey found that people with disabilities are excluded from informational occupations. Computer programming positions were fourth least likely of the 58 occupations examined to employ disabled people. As Rehing observed in 1987, it is a fantasy to think that accessibility for blind people simply means turning on a computer (Rehing in Goggin and Newell). Although it may sound empowering for people with disability to interact in an environment where they can live out an identity different from the rhythm of their daily patterns, the reality serves to decrease the visibility of disability in society. Further, the Internet may not be accessible for people with disability as a social environment in the first place. AbilityNet’s State of the eNation Web Accessibility Report: Social Networking Sites found a number of social networking sites including the popular MySpace and Facebook are inaccessible to users with a number of different disabilities, particularly those with a visual impairment such as blindness or a cognitive disability like dyslexia. This study noted the use of ‘Captcha’ – ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’ – technology designed to differentiate between a person signing up for an account and an automated computer process. This system presents an image of a word deliberately blurred and disfigured so that it cannot be readily identified by a computer, which can only be translated by a human user. This presents an obstacle to people with a visual impairment, particularly those relying on transcription software that will, by design, not be able to read the image, as well as those with dyslexia who may also have trouble translating the image on the screen. Virtual Worlds and New Possibilities The development of complex online virtual worlds such as Second Life presents their own set of challenges for access, for example, the use of Captcha. However they also afford opportunity. With over a million residents, there is a diversity of creativity. People are using Second Life to try on different identities or campaign for causes relevant in the real world. For example, Simon Stevens (Simon Walsh in SL), runs the nightclub Wheelies in the virtual world and continues to use a wheelchair and helmet in SL – similar to his real-life self: I personally changed Second Life’s attitude toward disability when I set up ‘Wheelies’, its first disability nightclub. This was one of those daft ideas which grew and grew and… has remained a central point for disability issues within Second Life. Many new Disabled users make contact with me for advice and wheelies has helped some of them ‘come out’ and use a wheelchair (Carter). Able-bodied people are also becoming involved in raising disability awareness through Second Life, for example Fez Richardson is developing applications for use in Second Life so that the non-disabled can experience the effects of impairment in this virtual realm (Cassidy) Tertiary Institutions are embracing the potential of Second Life, utilising the world as a virtual classroom. Bates argues that Second Life provides a learning environment free of physical barriers that has the potential to provide an enriched learning experience for all students regardless of whether they have a disability. While Second Life might be a good environment for those with mobility impairment there are still potential access problems for the vision and hearing impaired. However, Second Life has recently become open source and is actively making changes to aid accessibility for the visually impaired including an audible system where leaves rustle to denote a tree is nearby, and text to speech software (Sierra). Conclusion Goggin and Newell observe that new technology is a prominent component of social, cultural and political changes with the potential to mitigate for disability. The uneven interface of the virtual and the analogue, as demonstrated by the implementation and operation of iTunes, indicates that this mitigation is far from an inevitable consequence of this development. However James Edwards, author of the Brothercake blog, is optimistic that technology does have an important role in decreasing disability in wider society, in line with Finkelstein’s third phase: Technology is the last, best hope for accessibility. It's not like the physical world, where there are good, tangible reasons why some things can never be accessible. A person who's blind will never be able to drive a car manually; someone in a wheelchair will never be able to climb the steps of an ancient stone cathedral. Technology is not like the physical world – technology can take any shape. Technology is our slave, and we can make it do what we want. With technology there are no good reasons, only excuses (Edwards, "Technology"). Internet-based technologies have the potential to open up the world to people with disabilities, and are often presented as a way to eradicate disability as it is socially constructed. While Finkelstein believes new technologies characteristic of the information age will offset many of the prejudicial attitudes established during the industrial revolution, where technology was established around able-bodied norms, the examples of the iPhone and Captcha illustrate that digital technology is often constructed in the same social world that people with disability are routinely disabled by. The Lectopia system on the other hand enables students with disabilities to access lecture materials and highlights the concept of universal access, the original ideology underpinning design of the Web. Lectopia has been widely utilised by many different types of students, not just the disabled, who are seeking flexibility. While we should be optimistic, we must also be aware as noted by Goggin and Newell the Internet cannot be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. Accessibility is a universal design issue that potentially benefits both those with a disability and the wider community. References AbilityNet Web Accessibility Team. State of the eNation Web Accessibility Reports: Social Networking Sites. AbilityNet. January 2008. 12 Apr. 2008 ‹http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/docs/enation/2008SocialNetworkingSites.pdf›. Bates, Jacqueline. "Disability and Access in Virtual Worlds." Paper presented at Alternative Format Conference, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, 21–23 Jan. 2008. Bigham, Jeffrey P., Craig M. Prince, and Richard E. Ladner . "WebAnywhere: A Screen Reader On-the-Go." Paper presented at 17th International World Wide Web Conference, Beijing, 21–22 April 2008. 29 Apr. 2008 ‹http://webinsight.cs.washington.edu/papers/webanywhere-html/›. Brabazon, Tara. "Socrates in Earpods: The iPodification of Education." Fast Capitalism 2.1, (July 2006). 8 June 2008 ‹http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_1/brabazon.htm›. Carter, Paul. "Virtually the Same." Disability Now (May 2007). Cassidy, Margaret. "Flying with Disability in Second Life." Eureka Street 18.1 (10 Jan. 2008): 22-24. 15 June 2007 ‹http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=4849›. Crichton, Paul. "More on the iPhone…" Access 2.0. BBC.co.uk 22 Jan. 2007. 12 Apr. 2008 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/access20/2007/01/more_on_the_iphone.shtml›. Dean, Katie. "Duke Gives iPods to Freshmen." Wired Magazine (20 July 2004). 29 Apr. 2008 ‹http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2004/07/64282›. Edwards, James. "Stop Using Ajax!" Brothercake (24 April 2008). 1 May 2008 ‹http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/stop-using-ajax›. –––. "Technology Is the Last, Best Hope for Accessibility." Brothercake 13 Mar. 2007. 1 May 2008 ‹http://www.brothercake.com/site/resources/reference/hope›. Finkelstein, Victor. "To Deny or Not to Deny Disability." Magic Carpet 27.1 (1975): 31-38. 1 May 2008 ‹http://www.independentliving.org/docs1/finkelstein.html›. –––. Attitudes and Disabled People: Issues for Discussion. Geneva: World Rehabilitation Fund, 1980. 1 May 2008 ‹http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/archiveuk/finkelstein/attitudes.pdf›. Furendal, David. "Downloading Music and Videos from the Internet: A Study of the Accessibility of The Pirate Bay and iTunes store." Presentation at Uneå University, 24 Jan. 2007. 13 Apr. 2008 ‹http://www.david.furendal.com/Accessibility.aspx›. Groce, Nora E. Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1985. Goggin, Gerard, and Christopher Newell. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission. Accessibility of Electronic Commerce and New Service and Information Technologies for Older Australians and People with a Disability. 31 March 2000. 30 Apr. 2008 ‹http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/inquiries/ecom/ecomrep.htm#BM2_1›. Keizer, Gregg. "Hearing Loss Group Complains to FCC about iPhone." Computerworld (20 Sep. 2007). 12 Apr. 2008 ‹http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9037999›. Regan, Bob. "Accessibility and Design: A Failure of the Imagination." ACM International Conference Proceedings Series 63: Proceedings of The 2004 International Cross-disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A). 29–37. Sapey, Bob. "Disablement in the Information Age." Disability and Society 15.4 (June 2000): 619–637. Sierra. "IBM Project: Second Life Accessible for Blind People." Techpin (24 Sep. 2007). 3 May 2008 ‹http://www.techpin.com/ibm-project-second-life-accessible-for-blind-people/›. Smith, Tony. "Ten Years Old: The World’s First MP3 Player." Register Hardware (10 Mar. 2008). 12 Apr. 2008 ‹http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/03/10/ft_first_mp3_player/›. Udell, Jon. "The iTunes U Agenda." InfoWorld (22 Feb. 2006). 13 Apr. 2008 ‹http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/02/22.html›. Williams, Jocasta, and Michael Fardon. "Perpetual Connectivity: Lecture Recordings and Portable Media Players." Proceedings from Ascilite, Singapore, 2–5 Dec. 2007. 1084–1092. Wood, Lamont. "Blind Users Still Struggle with 'Maddening' Computing Obstacles." Computerworld (16 Apr. 2008). 27 Apr. 2008 ‹http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9077118&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1›. Zajicek, Mary. "Web 2.0: Hype or Happiness?" Paper presented at International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, Banff, Canada, 2–9 May 2007. 12 Apr. 2008 ‹http://www.w4a.info/2007/prog/k2-zajicek.pdf›. Zeff, Robbin. "Universal Design across the Curriculum." New Directions for Higher Education 137 (Spring 2007): 27–44.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Content warning: although it was kept to a minimum, this text displays instances of (anti-Semitic) hate speech. During the 2016 U.S. election and its aftermath, multiple journalistic accounts reported on “alt-right trolls” emanating from anonymous online spaces like the imageboard 4chan (e.g. Abramson; Ellis). Having gained infamy for its nihilist trolling subcultures (Phillips, This Is Why) and the loose hacktivist movement Anonymous (Coleman), 4chan now drew headlines because of the alt-right’s “genuinely new” concoction of white supremacy, ironic Internet humour, and a lack of clear leadership (Hawley 50). The alt-right “anons”, as imageboard users call themselves, were said to primarily manifest on the “Politically Incorrect” subforum of 4chan: /pol/. Gradually, a sentiment arose in the titles of several news articles that the pro-Trump “alt-right trolls” had successfully won the metapolitical battle intertwined with the elections (Phillips, Oxygen 5). For instance, articles titled that “trolls” were “The Only True Winners of this Election” (Dewey) or even “Plotting a GOP Takeover” (Stuart).The headlines were as enticing as questionable. As trolling-expert Whitney Phillips headlined herself, the alt-right did not attain political gravity solely through its own efforts but rather was “Conjured Out of Pearl Clutching and Media Attention” (“The Alt-Right”), with news outlets being provoked to criticise, debunk, or sensationalise its trolling activities (Faris et al. 131; Phillips, “Oxygen” 5-6). Even with the right intentions, attempts at denouncement through using vague, structuralist notions–from “alt-right” and “trolls” to “the basket of deplorables” (Robertson) – arguably only strengthened the coherence of those it was meant to disavow (Phillips, Oxygen; Phillips et al.; Marantz). Phillips et al. therefore lamented such generalisations, arguing attributing Trump’s win to vague notions of “4chan”, “alt-right”, or “trolls” actually bestowed an “atemporal, almost godlike power” to what was actually an “ever-reactive anonymous online collective”. Therefore, they called to refrain from making claims about opaque spaces like 4chan without first “plotting the landscape” and “safeguarding the actual record”. Indeed, “when it comes to 4chan and Anonymous”, Phillips et al. warned, “nobody steps in the same river twice”.This text answers the call to map anonymous online groups by engaging with the complexity of testing the muddy waters of the ever-changing and dissimulative 4chan-current. It first argues how anti-structuralist research outlooks can answer to many of the pitfalls arising from this complex task. Afterwards, it traces the word trump as it was used on 4chan/pol/ to problematise some of the above-mentioned media narratives. How did anons consider Trump, and how did the /pol/-current change during the build-up of the 2016 U.S. elections and afterwards?On Researching Masked and Dissimulative ExtremistsWhile potentially playing into the self-imagination of malicious actors (Phillips et al.), the frequent appearance of overblown narratives on 4chan is unsurprising considering the peculiar affordances of imageboards. Imageboards are anonymous – no user account is required to post – and ephemeral – posts are deleted after a certain amount of activity, sometimes after days, sometimes after minutes (Bernstein et al.; Hagen). These affordances complicate studying collectives on imageboards, with the primary reasons being that 1) they prevent insights into user demographics, 2) they afford particularly dissimulative, playful discourse that can rarely be taken at face value (Auerbach; de Zeeuw and Tuters), and 3) the sheer volume of auto-deleted activity means one has to stay up-to-date with a rapid waterfall of subcultural ephemera. Additionally, the person stepping into the muddy waters of the chan-river also changes their gaze over time. For instance, Phillips bravely narrates how she once saw parts of the 4chan-stream as “fun” to only later realise the blatantly racist elements present from the start (“It Wasn’t Just”).To help render legible the changing currents of imageboard activity without relying on vague understandings of the “alt-right”, “trolls”, or “Anonymous”, anti-structuralist research outlooks form a possible answer. Around 1900, sociologists like Gabriel Tarde already argued to refrain from departing from structuralist notions of society and instead let social compositions arise through iterative tracing of minute imitations (11). As described in Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, actor-network theory (ANT) revitalises the Tardean outlook by similarly criticising the notion of the “social” and “society” as distinct, sui-generis entities. Instead, ANT advocates tracing “flat” networks of agency made up of both human and non-human actors (165-72). By tracing actors and describing the emerging network of heterogeneous mediators and intermediaries (105), one can slowly but surely get a sense of collective life. ANT thus takes a page from ethnomethodology, which advocates a similar mapping of how participants of a group produce themselves as such (Garfinkel).For multiple reasons, anti-structuralist approaches like ANT can be useful in tracing elusive anonymous online groups and their changing compositions. First, instead of grasping collectives on imageboards from the outset through structuralist notions, as networked individuals, or as “amorphous and formless entities” (see e.g. Coleman 113-5), it only derives its composition after following where its actors lead. This can result in an empirical and literally objective mapping of their collectivity while refraining from mystifications and non-existent connections–so often present in popular narratives about “trolls” and the “alt-right”. At the same time, it allows prominent self-imaginations and mythologizations – or, in ANT-parlance, “localisations of the global” (Latour 173-190) – rise to the surface whenever they form important actors, which, as we will see, tends to happen on 4chan.Second, ANT offers a useful lens with which to consider how non-human actors can uphold a sense of collectivity within anonymous imageboards. This can include digital objects as part of the infrastructure–e.g. the automatically assigned post numbers having mythical value on 4chan (Beran, It Came From 69)–but also cultural objects like words or memes. Considering 4chan’s anonymity, this focus on objects instead of individuals is partly a necessity: one cannot know the exact amount and flow of users. Still, as this text seeks to show, non-human actors like words or memes can form suitable actors to map the changing collectivity of anonymous imageboard users in the absence of demographic insights.There are a few pitfalls worth noting when conducting ANT-informed research into extremist spaces like 4chan/pol/. The aforementioned ironic and dissimulative rhetoric of anonymous forum culture (de Zeeuw and Tuters) means tracing is complicated by implicit (yet omnipresent) intertextual references undecipherable to the untrained eye. Even worse, when misread or exaggerated, such tracing efforts can play into trolling tactics. This can in turn risk what Phillips calls “giving oxygen” to bigoted narratives by amplifying their presence (“Oxygen”). Since ANT does not prescribe what sort of description is needed (Latour 149), this exposure can be limited and/or critically engaged with by the researcher. Still, it is inevitable that research on extremist collectives adds at least some garbage to already polluted information ecologies (Phillips and Milner 2020), even when “just” letting the actors speak (Venturini). Indeed, this text will unfortunately also show hate speech terms below.These complications of irony and amplification can be somewhat mitigated by mixing ethnographic involvement with computational methods. Together, they can render implicit references explicit while also mapping broad patterns in imitation and preventing singular (misleading) actors from over-dominating the description. When done well, such descriptions do not only have to amplify but can also marginalise and trivialise. An accurate mapping can thereby counter sensationalist media narratives, as long as that is where the actors lead. It because of this potentiality that anti-structuralist tracing of extremist, dissimulative online groups should not be discarded outright.Stopping Momentarily to Test the WatersTo put the above into practice, what follows is a brief case study on the term trump on 4chan/pol/. Instead of following users, here the actor trump is taken an entry point for tracing various assemblages: not only referring to Donald J. Trump as an individual and his actions, but also to how /pol/-anons imagine themselves in relation to Trump. In this way, the actor trump is a fluid one: each of its iterations contains different boundaries and variants of its environment (de Laet and Mol 252). By following these environments, can we make sense of how the delirious 2016 U.S. election cycle played out on /pol/, a space described as the “skeleton key to the rise of Trump” (Beran, 4chan)?To trace trump, I use the 4plebs.com archive, containing almost all posts made on /pol/ between late-2013 and early 2018 (the time of research). I subsequently use two text mining methods to trace various connections between trump and other actors and use this to highlight specific posts. As Latour et al. note, computational methods allow “navigations” (593) of different data points to ensure diverse empirical perspectives, preventing both structuralist “zoomed-out” views and local contexts from over-dominating. Instead of moving between micro and macro views, such a navigation should therefore be understood as a “circulation” around the data, deploying various perspectives that each assemble the actors in a different way. In following this, the case study aims to demonstrate how, instead of a lengthy ethnographic account, a brief navigation using both quali- and quantitative perspectives can quickly demystify some aspects of seemingly nebulous online groups.Tracing trump: From Meme-Wizard to Anti-Semitic TargetTo get a sense of the centrality of Trump on /pol/, I start with post frequencies of trump assembled in two ways. The first (Figure 1) shows how, soon after the announcement of Trump’s presidential bid on 16 June 2015, around 100,000 comments mention the word (2% of the total amount of posts). The frequencies spike to a staggering 8% of all comments during the build-up to Trump’s win of the Republican nomination in early 2016 and presidential election in November 2016. Figure 1: The absolute and relative amount of posts on 4chan/pol/ containing the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).To follow the traces between trump and the more general discourse surrounding it, I compiled a more general “trump-dense threads” dataset. These are threads containing thirty or more posts, with at least 15% of posts mentioning trump. As Figure 2 shows, at the two peaks, 8% of any thread on /pol/ was trump-dense, accounting for approximately 15,000 monthly threads. While Trump’s presence is unsurprising, these two views show just how incredibly central the former businessman was to /pol/ at the time of the 2016 U.S. election. Figure 2: The absolute and relative amount of threads on 4chan/pol/ that are “trump-dense”, meaning they have thirty comments or more, out of which at least 15% contain the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).Instead of picking a certain moment from these aggregate overviews and moving to the “micro” (Latour et al.), I “circulate” further with Figure 3, showing another perspective on the trump­-dense thread dataset. It shows a scatter plot of trump-dense threads grouped per week and plotted according to how similar their vocabulary is. First, all the words per week are weighted with tf-idf, a common information retrieval algorithm that scores units on the basis if they appear a lot in one of the datasets but not in others (Spärck-Jones). The document sets are then plotted according to the similarity of their weighted vocabulary (cosine similarity). The five highest-scoring terms for the five clusters (identified with K-means) are listed in the bottom-right corner. For legibility, the scatterplot is compressed by the MDS algorithm. To get a better sense of specific vocabulary per week, terms that appeared in all weeks are filtered out (like trump or hillary). Read counterclockwise, the nodes roughly increase in time, thus showing a clear temporal change of discourse, with the first clusters being more similar in vocabulary than the last, and the weeks before and after the primary election (orange cluster) showing a clear gap. Figure 3: A scatterplot showing cosine distances between tf-idf weighted vocabularies of trump-dense threads per week. Compressed with MDS and coloured by five K-means clusters on the underlying tf-idf matrix (excluding terms that appeared in all weeks). Legend shows the top five tf-idf terms within these clusters. ★ denotes the median week in the cluster.With this map, we can trace other words appearing around trump as significant actors in the weekly documents. For instance, Trump-supportive words like stump (referring to “Can’t Stump the Trump”) and maga (“Make America Great Again”) are highly ranked in the first two clusters. In later weeks, less clearly pro-Trump terms appear: drumpf reminds of the unattractive root of the Trump family name, while impeached and mueller show the Russia probe in 2017 and 2018 were significant in the trump-dense threads of that time. This change might thus hint at growing scepticism towards Trump after his win, but it is not shown how these terms are used. Fortunately, the scatterplot offers a rudder with which to navigate to further perspectives.In keeping with Latour’s advice to keep “aggregate structures” and “local contexts” flat (165-72), I contrast the above scatterplot with a perspective on the data that keeps sentence structures intact instead of showing abstracted keyword sets. Figure 4 uses all posts mentioning trump in the median weeks of the first and last clusters in the scatterplot (indicated with ★) and visualises word trees (Wattenberg and Viégas) of most frequent words following “trump is a”. As such, they render explicit ontological associations about Trump; what is Trump, according to /pol/-anons? The first word tree shows posts from 2-8 November 2015, when fifteen Republican competitors were still in the race. As we have seen in Figure 1, Trump was in this month still “only” mentioned in around 50,000 posts (2% of the total). This word tree suggests his eventual nomination was at this point seen as an unlikely and even undesirable scenario, showing derogatory associations like retard and failure, as well as more conspiratorial words like shill, fraud, hillary plant, and hillary clinton puppet. Notably, the most prominent association, meme, and others like joke and f*cking comic relief, imply Trump was not taken too seriously (see also Figure 5). Figure 4: Word trees of words following “trump is a” in the median weeks of the first and last clusters of the scatterplot. Made with Jason Davies’s Word Tree application. Figure 5: Anons who did not take Trump seriously. Screencapture taken from archive.4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).The first word tree contrast dramatically with the one from the last median week from 18 to 24 December 2017. Here, most associations are anti-Semitic or otherwise related to Judaism, with trump most prominently related to the hate speech term kike. This prompts several questions: did /pol/ become increasingly anti-Semitic? Did already active users radicalise, or were more anti-Semites drawn to /pol/? Or was this nefarious current always there, with Trump merely drawing anti-Semitic attention after he won the election? Although the navigation did not depart from a particular critical framework, by “just following the actors” (Venturini), it already stumbled upon important questions related to popular narratives on 4chan and the alt-right. While it is tempting to stop here and explain the change as “radicalisation”, the navigation should continue to add more empirical perspectives. When doing so, the more plausible explanation is that the unlikely success of Trump briefly attracted (relatively) more diverse and playful visitors to /pol/, obscuring the presence and steady growth of overt extremists in the process.To unpack this, I first focus on the claim that a (relatively) diverse set of users flocked to /pol/ because of the Trump campaign. /pol/’s overall posting activity rose sharply during the 2016 election, which can point to already active users becoming more active, but is likely mostly caused by new users flocking to /pol/. Indeed, this can be traced in actor language. For instance, many anons professed to be “reporting in” from other 4chan boards during crucial moments in the campaing. One of the longest threads in the trump-dense threads dataset (4,504 posts) simply announces “Cruz drops out”. In the comments below, multiple anons state they arrived from other boards to join the Trump-infused activity. For instance, Figure 6 shows an anon replying “/v/ REPORTING IN”, to which sixty other users reacted by similarly affirming themselves as representatives from other boards (e.g. “/mu/ here. Ready to MAGA”). While but another particular view, this implies Trump’s surprising nomination stimulated a crowd-like gathering of different anons jumping into the vortex of trump-related activity on /pol/. Figure 6: Replies by outside-anons “reporting in” the sticky thread announcing Ted Cruz's drop out, 4 May 2016. Screenshots taken from 4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).Other actor-language further expresses Trump’s campaign “drew in” new and unadjusted (or: less extreme) users. Notably, many anons claimed the 2016 election led to an “invasion of Reddit users”. Figure 7 shows one such expression: an annotated timeline of /pol/’s posting activity graph (made by 4plebs), posted to /pol/ on 26 February 2016 and subsequently reposted 34 times. It interprets 2016 as a period where “Trump sh*t goes into overdrive, meme sh*t floods /pol/, /pol/ is now reddit”. Whether these claims hold any truth is difficult to establish, but the image forms an interesting case of how the entirety “/pol/” is imagined and locally articulated. Such simplistic narratives relate to what Latour calls “panoramas”: totalising notions of some imagined “whole” (188-90) that, while not to be “confused with the collective”, form crucial data since they express how actors understand their own composition (190). Especially in the volatile conditions of anonymous and ephemeral imageboards, repeated panoramic narratives can help in constructing a sense of cohesion–and thereby also form interesting actors to trace. Indeed, following the panoramic statement “/pol/ is now reddit”, other gatekeeping-efforts are not hard to find. For instance, phrases urging other anons to go “back to reddit” (occurring in 19,069 posts in the total dataset) or “back to The_Donald” (a popular pro-Trump subreddit, 1,940 posts) are also particularly popular in the dataset. Figure 7: An image circulated on /pol/ lamenting that "/pol/ is now reddit" by annotating 4plebs’s posting metrics. Screenshot taken from archive.4plebs.org (see posts).Did trump-related activity on /pol/ indeed become more “meme-y” or “Reddit-like” during the election cycle, as the above panorama articulates? The activity in the trump-dense threads seems to suggest so. Figure 8 again uses the tf-idf terms from these threads, but here with the columns denoting the weeks and the rows the top scoring tf-idf terms of their respective week. To highlight relevant actors, all terms are greyed out (see the unedited sheet here), except for several keywords that indicate particularly playful or memetic vernacular: the aforementioned stump, emperor, referring to Trump’s nickname as “God Emperor”; energy, referring to “high energy”, a common catchphrase amongst Trump supporters; magic, referring to “meme magic”, the faux-ironic belief that posting memes affects real-life events; and pepe, the infamous cartoon frog. In both the tf-idf ranking and the absolute frequencies, these keywords flourish in 2016, but disappear soon after the presidential election passes. The later weeks in 2017 and 2018 rarely contain similarly playful and memetic terms, and if they do, suggest mocking discourse regarding Trump (e.g. drumpf). This perspective thus pictures the environment around trump in the run-up to the election as a particularly memetic yet short-lived carnival. At least from this perspective, “meme sh*t” thus indeed seemed to have “flooded /pol/”, but only for a short while. Figure 8: tf-idf matrix of trump-dense threads, columns denoting weeks and rows denoting the top hundred most relevant terms per week. Download the full tf-idf matrix with all terms here.Despite this carnivalesque activity, further perspectives suggest it did not go at the expense of extremist activity on /pol/. Figure 9 shows the absolute and relative counts of the word "jew" and its derogatory synonym "kike". Each of these increases from 2015 onwards. As such, it seems to align with claims that Trump’s success and /pol/ becoming increasingly extremist were causally related (Thompson). However, apart from possibly confusing correlation with causation, the relative presence remains fairly stable, even slightly decreasing during the frenzy of the Trump campaign. Since we also saw Trump himself become a target for anti-Semitic activity, these trendlines rather imply /pol/’s extremist current grew proportionally to the overall increase in activity, and increased alongside but not but necessarily as a partisan contingent as a result of Trump’s campaign. Figure 9: The absolute and relative frequency of the terms "jew" and "kike" on 4chan/pol/.ConclusionCombined, the above navigation implies two main changes in 4chan/pol/’s trump-related current. First, the climaxes of the 2016 Republican primaries and presidential elections seem to have invoked crowd-like influxes of (relatively) heterogeneous users joining the Trump-delirium, marked by particularly memetic activity. Second, /pol/ additionally seemed to have formed a welcoming hotbed for anti-Semites and other extremists, as the absolute amount of (anti-Semitic) hate speech increased. However, while already-present and new users might have been energised by Trump, they were not necessarily loyal to him, as professed by the fact that Trump himself eventually became a target. Together with the fact that anti-Semitic hate speech stayed relatively consistent, instead of being “countercultural” (Nagle) or exclusively pro-Trump, /pol/ thus seems to have been composed of quite a stable anti-Semitic and Trump-critical contingent, increasing proportionally to /pol/’s general growth.Methodologically, this text sought to demonstrate how a brief navigation of trump on 4chan/pol/ can provide provisional yet valuable insights regarding continuously changing current of online anonymous collectives. As the cliché goes, however, this brief exploration has left more many questions, or rather, it did not “deploy the content with all its connections” (Latour 147). For instance, I have not touched on how many of the trump-dense threads are distinctly separated and pro-Trump “general threads” (Jokubauskaitė and Peeters). Considering the vastness of such tasks, the necessity remains to find appropriate ways to “accurately map” the wild currents of the dissimulative Web–despite how muddy they might get.NoteThis text is a compressed and edited version of a longer MA thesis available here.ReferencesAbramson, Seth. “Listen Up, Progressives: Here’s How to Deal with a 4Chan (“Alt-Right”) Troll.” Medium, 2 May 2017. <https://medium.com/@Seth_Abramson/listen-up-progressives-heres-how-to-deal-with-a-4chan-alt-right-troll-48594f59a303>.Auerbach, David. “Anonymity as Culture: Treatise.” Triple Canopy, n.d. 22 June 2020 <https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/anonymity_as_culture__treatise>.Beran, Dale. “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump”. Medium, 14 Feb. 2017. <https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb>.Beran, Dale. It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. New York: All Points Books, 2019.Bernstein, Michael S, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul André, Katrina Panovich, and Greg Vargas. “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2011.Coleman, Gabriella. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. London: Verso Books, 2014.De Laet, Marianne, and Annemarie Mol. “The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology.” Social Studies of Science 30.2 (2000): 225–263. 1 May 2020 <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030631200030002002>. De Zeeuw, Daniel, and Marc Tuters. “Teh Internet Is Serious Business: On the Deep Vernacular Web Imaginary.” Cultural Politics 16.2 (2020).Dewey, Caitlin. “The Only True Winners of this Election are Trolls.” The Washington Post, 3 Nov. 2016. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/03/the-only-true-winners-of-this-election-are-trolls/>.Faris, Robert, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler. “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Berkman Klein Center Research Publication, 2017. <http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33759251>.Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967.Hagen, Sal. “Rendering Legible the Ephemerality of 4chan/pol/.” OILab.eu, 12 Apr. 2020. <https://oilab.eu/rendering-legible-the-ephemerality-of-4chanpol/>.Hawley, George. Making Sense of the Alt-Right. New York: Columbia UP, 2017.Jokubauskaitė, Emilija, and Stijn Peeters. “Generally Curious: Thematically Distinct Datasets of General Threads on 4chan/Pol/”. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 14.1 (2020): 863-7. <https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/7351>.Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.Latour, Bruno, Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini, Sébastian Grauwin, and Dominique Boullier. “‘The Whole Is Always Smaller than Its Parts’. A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads.” British Journal of Sociology 63.4 (2012): 590-615.Marantz, Andrew. Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. New York: Penguin Random House, 2019.Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the White House. Winchester: Zero Books, 2017.Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.———. “The Alt-Right Was Conjured Out of Pearl Clutching and Media Attention.” Motherboard, 12 Oct. 2016 <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jpgaeb/conjuring-the-alt-right>.———. “The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online.” Data & Society, 2018. <https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/1_PART_1_Oxygen_of_Amplification_DS.pdf>.———. “It Wasn’t Just the Trolls: Early Internet Culture, ‘Fun,’ and the Fires of Exclusionary Laughter.” Social Media + Society (2019). <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305119849493>.Phillips, Whitney, Gabriella Coleman, and Jessica Beyer. “Trolling Scholars Debunk the Idea That the Alt-Right’s sh*tposters Have Magic Powers.” Motherboard, 22 Mar. 2017. <https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4k549/trolling-scholars-debunk-the-idea-that-the-alt-rights-trolls-have-magic-powers>.Robertson, Adi. “Hillary Clinton Exposing Pepe the Frog Is the Death of Explainers.” The Verge, 15 Sep. 2016. <https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/15/12926976/hillary-clinton-trump-pepe-the-frog-alt-right-explainer>.Spärck Jones, Karen. “A Statistical Interpretation of Term Specificity and its Application in Retrieval.” Journal of Documentation 28.1 (1972): 11-21.Stuart, Tessa. “Inside the DeploraBall: The Trump-Loving Trolls Plotting a GOP Takeover.” Rolling Stone, 20 Jan. 2017. <https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/inside-the-deploraball-the-trump-loving-trolls-plotting-a-gop-takeover-128128/>.Tarde, Gabriel. The Laws of Imitation. Ed. and trans. Elsie Clews Parsons. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1903.Thompson, Andrew. “The Measure of Hate on 4chan.” Rolling Stone, 10 May 2018. <https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-measure-of-hate-on-4chan-627922/>.Venturini, Tommaso. “Diving in Magma: How to Explore Controversies with Actor-Network Theory.” Public Understanding of Science 19.3 (2010): 258-273.Wattenberg, Martin, and Fernanda Viégas. “The Word Tree, an Interactive Visual Concordance.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 14.6 (2008): 1221-1228.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Fan cultural production, be it in the form of fan fiction, art or videos are often celebrated in fan studies as evidence of fan creativity, fans’ skills in adopting technology and their expert knowledge of the texts. As Jenkins argues, “the pleasure of the form centers on the fascination in watching familiar images wrenched free from their previous contexts and assigned alternative meanings” (227). However, can fan mash-up videos can also offer an alternative view, not of one’s fandom, but of anti-fandom? Fan pleasure is often seen as declaring love for a text through juxtaposing images to sound in a mash-up video, but this paper will argue that it can also demonstrate hate. Specifically, can these videos affirm anti-fandom readings of a particular text, when clips from two (or more) different texts, seemingly of the same genre and targeting the same demographics, are edited together to offer an alternative story? In 2009, a video entitled Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed (hereafter BvE) (See Video 1) was uploaded to YouTube, juxtaposing clips from across the seven series of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and the first film of the Twilight series. Twilight is a series of novels written by Stephenie Meyer which was adapted into a successful series of five films between the period of 2008 and 2012. Its vampire-centric romance story has resulted in numerous comparisons to, among others, the cult and popular television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (hereafter Buffy) created by Joss Whedon, which aired from 1997 to 2003. In BvE, which has over three million views to date and reportedly has been translated into thirty different languages, Jonathan McIntosh, the video’s creator, “changes Edward Cullen from a smouldering, sparkly antihero into a self-obsessed stalker who's prone to throwing tantrums. Buffy Summers reacts to him with disdain and dwindling patience, assertively rebuking his every self-indulgence” (Leduc). By editing together clips from two texts seemingly of the same genre and targeting the same demographics, this video affirms an anti-fandom reading of Twilight. Video 1: Buffy vs Edward: Twilight RemixedOn the first viewing of the video, I was struck by how accurately it portrayed my own misgivings about Twilight, and by how I had wished Bella Swan was more like Buffy Summers and been a positive role model for girls and women. The content of the video mash-up—along with fan reactions to it—suggests and perpetuates an anti-fandom reading of Twilight via Buffy, by positioning the latter as a text with higher cultural value, in terms of its influence and representations of female characters. As McIntosh himself clarifies in an interview, “the audience is not supposed to go “Oh, see how TV is stupid?” They’re supposed to go “Oh, see how Buffy was awesome!”” (ikat381). As such, the BvE mash-up can be read, not just as a criticism of popular commercial texts, but also as an anti-fan production. Much work surrounding fan culture extrapolates on fans’ love for a text, but I’d like to propose that mash-ups such as BvE reaffirms anti-fandom readings of derided texts via another that is deemed—and presented—as culturally more valuable. In this essay, BvE will be used as an example of how anti-fandom productions can reinforce the audience’s opinion of a despised text. When BvE first launched, it was circulated widely among Buffy fandom, and the narrative of the mash-up, and its implications were debated rather fiercely on Whedonesque.com [http://whedonesque.com/comments/20883], one of the main sites for Joss Whedon’s fandom. Comparisons between the two texts, despite existing in different mediums (film vs. television), were common among general media—some survey respondents reveal they were persuaded to read the books or watch the first film by its assumed similarities to Buffy— as both feature somewhat similar storylines on the surface: a young, teenaged (human) girl falling in love with a vampire, and were presumably aimed at the same demographics of teenaged and college-aged girls. The similarities seem to end there though, for while Buffy is often hailed as a feminist text, Twilight is dismissed as anti-feminist, down to its apparently rabid and overly-emotional (female) fanbase. As one Buffy fan on Whedonesque clarifies: Buffy was more real than Bella ever thought of being. Buffy was flawed, made mistakes, bad decisions and we never saw her sort out a healthy romantic relationship but she was still a tremendous role model not for just teen girl but teen boys as well. […] Bella's big claim to fame seems to be she didn't sleep with her boyfriend before marriage but that was his choice, not hers. BvE appears to reflect the above comparison, as McIntosh justifies the video as “a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behaviour”—essentially a problem that Buffy, as a vampire slayer and a feminist icon can solve (for the greater good). For the purpose of this paper, I was interested to see if those who are active in fandom in general are aware of the BvE video, and if it informs or reaffirms their anti-fandom views of Twilight. Methodology A short online survey was devised with this in mind and a link to the survey was provided via Twitter (the link was retweeted 27 times), with the explanation that it is on Twilight anti-fandom and the BvE mash-up video. It was further shared on Facebook, by friends and peers. At the same time, I also requested for the link to be posted by the administrators of Whedonesque.com. Despite the posting at Whedonesque, the survey was not particularly aimed at Buffy fans, but rather fans in general who are familiar with both texts. The survey received 419 responses in the span of 24 hours, suggesting that the topic of (Twilight) anti-fandom is one that fans—or anti-fans—are passionately engaged with. Out of the 419 responses, 357 people have seen BvE, and 208 have read the book(s) and/or saw the film(s). The other 211 respondents came into contact with Twilight through paratexts, “semi-textual fragments that surround and position the work” (Gray New 72), such as trailers, word-of-mouth and news outlets. Anti-Fandom, Twilight, and the Buffy vs Edward Mash-Up Fan studies have given us insights into the world of fandom, informing us about the texts that fans love, what fans do with those texts and characters, and how fans interact with one another within the context of fandom. As Henry Jenkins explains: Fan culture finds that utopian dimension within popular culture a site for constructing an alternative culture. Its society is responsive to the needs that draw its members to commercial entertainment, most especially the desire for affiliation, friendship, community (282). Fan studies has obviously progressed from Jenkins’s initial observations as fan scholars subsequently proceed to complicate and augment the field. However, many gaps and silences remain to be filled: Hills (2002) […] argued that fandom is ‘not a thing that can be picked over analytically’ (pp. xi-xii) and separated into neat categories, but is a performative, psychological action that differs according to person, fandom, and generation (Sheffield and Merlo 209). In a 2003 article, Jonathan Gray reflects that in fan scholars’ enthusiasm to present the many interesting facets of fan culture, “reception studies are distorting our understanding of the text, the consumer and the interaction between them” (New Audiences 68). So while there is the friendship, affiliation and sense of community where fans share their mutual affection for their favourite texts and characters, there are also those who engage critically with the texts that they dislike. Gray identifies them as the anti-fans, arguing that these anti-fans are not “against fandom per se, […] but they strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel” (New New Audiences 70). Most anti-fans’ encounter with their hated text will not merely be through the text itself, but also through its surrounding paratexts, such as trailers and press articles. These paratextual pieces inform the anti-fan about the text, as much as the original text itself, and together they add to the formation of the anti-fannish identity: Rather than engaging the text directly, […] anti-fans often respond to a “text” they construct from paratextual fragments such as news coverage or word-of-mouth, reading, watching, and learning all they can about a show, book, or person in order to better understand and criticize the text (and, very often, its fans) (Sheffield and Merlo 209). Media attention directed at the Twilight franchise, as well as the attention Twilight fans receive has made it a popular subject in both fan and anti-fan studies. Dan Haggard, in a 2010 online posting, commented on the fascinating position of Twilight fans in popular culture: The Twilight fan is interesting because of reports (however well substantiated) of a degree of extremism that goes beyond what is acceptable, even when considered from a perspective relative to standard fan obsession. The point here is not so much whether Twilight fans are any more extreme than standard fans, but that there is a perception that they are so. (qtd. in Pinkowitz) Twilight fans are more often than not, described as “rabid” and “frenzied” (Click), particularly by the media. This is, of course, in total opposition to the identity of the fan as effective consumer or productive (free) labourer, which scholars like Baym and Burnett, for example, have observed. The anti-fandom in this case seems to go beyond the original text (both the books and the film franchises), extending to the fans themselves. Pinkowitz explains that the anti-fans she examined resent the success Twilight has amassed as they consider the books to be poorly written and they “strongly dislike the popular belief that the Twilight books are good literature and that they deserve the fanaticism its rabid fans demonstrate”. Some survey respondents share this view, criticising that the “writing is horrible”, the books have “awful prose” and “melodramatic characterisations”. Sheffield and Merlo demonstrate that the “most visible Twilight anti-fan behaviors are those that mock or “snark” about the “rabid” Twilight fans, who they argue, “give other fans a bad name”” (210). However, BvE presents another text with which Twilight can be compared to in the form of Buffy. As one survey respondent explains: Bella is a weak character who lacks agency. She lacks the wit, will-power, and determination that makes Buffy such a fun character. […] She is a huge step back especially compared to Buffy, but also compared to almost any modern heroine. Paul Booth argues that for mash-ups, or remixes, to work, as audiences, we are expected to understand—and identify—the texts that are referenced, even if they may be out of context: “we as audiences must be knowledgeable about both sources, as well as the convergence of them, in order to make sense of the final product”. Survey respondents have commented that the mash-up was “more about pleasing Buffy fans”, and that it was “created with an agenda, by someone who hates Twilight and loves Buffy,” which gives “a biased introduction to Buffy”. On the other hand, others have commented that the mash-up “makes [Twilight] seem better than it actually is”, and that it “reinforced [their] perceptions” of Twilight as a weaker text. Booth also suggests that mash-ups create new understandings of taste, of which I would argue that is reinforced through BvE, which McIntosh describes as a “metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21st century”. In fact, many of the survey respondents share McIntosh’s view, criticising Twilight as an anti-feminist text that, for all its supposed cultural influence, is sending a dangerous message to young girls who are the target demographic of the franchise. As they reflect: It bothers me that so many people (and especially women) love and embrace the story, when at its crux it is about a woman trying to choose between two men. Neither men are particularly good/safe for her, but the book romanticizes the possible violence toward Bella. The idea that Bella is nothing without Edward, that her entire life is defined by this man. She gives up her life—literally—to be with him. It is unhealthy and obsessive. It also implies to women that stalking behaviour like Edward's is romantic rather than illegal. I think what bothers me the most is how Meyers presents an abusive relationship where the old guy (but he's sparkly and pretty, so it's ok) in question stalks the heroine, has her kidnapped, and physically prevents her from seeing whom she wants to see is portrayed as love. In a good way. These testimonials show that fans take a moral stand towards Twilight’s representation of women, specifically Bella Swan. Twilight acts in counterpoint to a text like Buffy, which is critically acclaimed and have been lauded for its feminist representation (the idea that a young, petite girl has the power to fight vampires and other supernatural creatures). The fact that Buffy is a chronological older text makes some fans lament that the girl-power and empowerment that was showcased in the 1990s has now regressed down to the personification of Bella Swan. Gray argues that anti-fandom is also about expectations of quality and value: “of what a text should be like, of what is a waste of media time and space, of what morality or aesthetics texts should adopt, and of what we would like to see others watch or read” (New 73). This notion of taste, and cultural value comes through again as respondents who are fans of Buffy testify: It's not very well-written. I strongly dislike the weak parallels one could draw between the two. Yes Angel and Spike went through a creepy stalking phase with Buffy, and yes for a while there was some romantic triangle action but there was so much more going on. […] My biggest issue is with Bella's characterization. She has flaws and desires but she is basically a whiney, mopey blob. She is a huge step back especially compared to Buffy, but also compared to almost any modern heroine. There is tremendous richness in Buffy—themes are more literate, historically allusive and psychologically deeper than boy-meets-girl, girl submits, boy is tamed. Edward Cullen is white-faced and blank; Spike and Angel are white-faced and shadowed, hollowed, sculpted—occasionally tortured. Twilight invites teen girls to project their desires; Spike and Angel have qualities which are discovered. Buffy the character grows and evolves. Her environment changes as she experiences the world around her. Decisions that she made in high school were re-visited years later, and based on her past experiences, she makes different choices. Bella, however, loses nothing. There's no consequence to her being turned. There's no growth to her character. The final act in the mash-up video, of Buffy slaying Edward can be seen as a re-empowerment for those who do not share the same love for Twilight as its fans do. In the follow-up to his 2003 article that launched the concept of anti-fandom, Gray argues that: Hate or dislike of a text can be just as powerful as can a strong and admiring, affective relationship with a text, and they can produce just as much activity, identification, meaning, and “effects” or serve just as powerfully to unite and sustain a community or subculture (Antifandom 841). Conclusion The video mash-up, in this case, can be read as an anti-fandom reading of Twilight via Buffy, in which the superiority of Buffy as a text is repeatedly reinforced. When asked if the mash-up video would encourage the survey respondents to consider watching Twilight (if they have not before), the respondents’ answers range from a repeated mantra of “No”, to “It makes me want to burn every copy”, to “Not unless it is to mock, or for the purpose of a drinking game”. Not merely resorting to mocking, what McIntosh’s mash-up video has given Twilight anti-fans is yet another paratextual fragment with which to read the text (as in, Edward Cullen is creepy and controlling, therefore he deserves to be slayed, as should have happened if he was in the Buffy universe instead of Twilight). In other words, what I am suggesting here is that anti-fandom can be enforced through the careful framing of a mash-up video, such as that of the Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed mash-up, where the text considered more culturally valuable is used to read and comment on the one considered less valuable. References Baym, Nancy, and Robert Burnett. Amateur Experts: International Fan Labour in Swedish Independent Music. Copenhagen, Denmark, 2008. Booth, Paul. “Mashup as Temporal Amalgam: Time, Taste, and Textuality.” Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012): n. pag. 3 Apr. 2013 < http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/297/285 >. Click, Melissa. “‘Rabid’, ‘Obsessed’, and ‘Frenzied’: Understanding Twilight Fangirls and the Gendered Politics of Fandom.” Flow 11.4 (2009): n. pag. 18 June 2013 < http://flowtv.org/2009/12/rabid-obsessed-and-frenzied-understanding-twilight-fangirls-and-the-gendered-politics-of-fandom-melissa-click-university-of-missouri/ >. Gray, Jonathan. “Antifandom and the Moral Text: Television without Pity and Textual Dislike.” American Behavioral Scientist 48 (2005): 840–858. ———. “New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6.1 (2003): 64–81. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. ikat381. “Total Recut Interviews Jonathan McIntosh about Buffy vs. Edward.” Total Recut 24 Dec. 2009. 20 July 2013 < http://www.totalrecut.com/permalink.php?perma_id=265 >. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Leduc, Martin. “The Two-Source Illusion: How Vidding Practices Changed Jonathan McIntosh’s Political Remix Videos.” Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012): n. pag. 19 July 2013 < http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/379/274 >. McIntosh, Jonathan. “Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed.” Rebelliouspixels 20 June 2009. 2 Apr. 2013 < http://www.rebelliouspixels.com/2009/buffy-vs-edward-twilight-remixed >. Pinkowitz, Jacqueline. “‘The Rabid Fans That Take [Twilight] Much Too Seriously’: The Construction and Rejection of Excess in Twilight Antifandom.” Transformative Works and Cultures 7 (2011): n. pag. 21 June 2013 < http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/247/253 >. Sheffield, Jessica, and Elyse Merlo. “Biting Back: Twilight Anti-Fandom and the Rhetoric of Superiority.” Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media and the Vampire Franchise. Eds. Melissa Click, Jessica Stevens Aubrey, & Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2010. 207–224.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Could we also imagine a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences -- his feelings, moods, and the rest -- for his private use? Well, can't we do so in our ordinary language? -- But that is not what I mean. The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations par. 243 I will be using 'audience' in two ways in the following essay: as a phenomenon that produces and is produced by media technologies (readers, hearers, viewers, Internet-users), and as something, audiens, that is essential to language itself, something without which language cannot be. I shall do so in specific references to invented languages. Who, then, are the 'consumers' of invented languages? In referring to invented languages, I am not talking about speakers of Esperanto or Occidental; I am not concerned with the invention of international auxiliary languages. These projects, already well-debated, have roots that go back at least as far as the 17th-century language philosophers who were at pains to undo the damage of Babel and restore a common language to the world. While Esperanto never became what it intended to be, it at least has readers and speakers. I am also not even talking about speakers of Klingon or Quenya. These privately invented languages have had the good fortune to be attached to popular invented cultures, and to media with enough money and publicity to generate a multitude of fans. Rather, I am talking about a phenomenon on the Internet and in a well- populated listserv whereby a number of people from all over the globe have discovered each other on-line. They all have a passion for what Jeffrey Schnapp calls uglossia ('no-language', after utopia, 'no-place'). Umberto Eco calls it 'technical insanity' or glottomania. Linguist Marina Yaguello calls language inventors fous du langage ('language lunatics') in her book of the same title. Jeffrey Henning prefers the term 'model language' in his on-line newsletter: 'miniaturized versions that provide the essence of something'. On CONLANG, people call themselves conlangers (from 'constructed language') and what they do conlanging. By forming this list, they have created a media audience for themselves, in the first sense of the term, and also literally in the second sense, as a number of them are setting up soundbytes on their elaborately illustrated and explicated Webpages. Originally devoted to advocates for international auxiliary languages, CONLANG started out about eight years ago, and as members joined who were less interested in the politics than in the hobby of language invention, the list has become almost solely the domain of the latter, whereas the 'auxlangers', as they are called, have moved to another list. An important distinguishing feature of 'conlangers' is that, unlike the 'auxlangers', there is no sustained hope that their languages will have a wide-body of hearers or users. They may wish it, but they do not advocate for it, and as a consequence their languages are free to be a lot weirder, whereas the auxlangs tend to strive for regularity and useability. CONLANG is populated by highschool, college, and graduate students; linguists; computer programmers; housewives; librarians; professors; and other users worldwide. The old debate about whether the Internet has become the 'global village' that Marshall McLuhan predicted, or whether it threatens to atomise communication 'into ever smaller worlds where enthusiasms mutate into obsessions', as Jeff Salamon warns, seems especially relevant to a study of CONLANG whose members indulge in an invention that by its very nature excludes the casual listener-in. And yet the audio-visual capacities of the Internet, along with its speed and efficiency of communication, have made it the ideal forum for conlangers. Prior to the Web, how were fellow inventors to know that others were doing -- in secret? J.R.R. Tolkien has been lauded as a rare exception in the world of invention, but would his elaborate linguistic creations have become so famous had he not published The Lord of the Rings and its Appendix? Poignantly, he tells in "A Secret Vice" about accidentally overhearing another army recruit say aloud: 'Yes! I think I shall express the accusative by a prefix!'. Obviously, silent others besides Tolkien were inventing languages, but they did not have the means provided by the Internet to discover one another except by chance. Tolkien speaks of the 'shyness' and 'shame' attached to this pursuit, where 'higher developments are locked in secret places'. It can win no prizes, he says, nor make birthday presents for aunts. His choice of title ("A Secret Vice") echoes a Victorian phrase for the closet, and conlangers have frequently compared conlanging to hom*osexuality, both being what conservative opinion expects one to grow out of after puberty. The number of gay men on the list has been wondered at as more than coincidental. In a survey I conducted in October 1998, many of the contributors to CONLANG felt that the list put them in touch with an audience that provided them with intellectual and emotional feedback. Their interests were misunderstood by parents, spouses, lovers, and employers alike, and had to be kept under wraps. Most of those I surveyed said that they had been inventing a language well before they had heard of the list; that they had conceived of what they were doing as unique or peculiar, until discovery of CONLANG; and that other people's Websites astounded them with the pervasive fascination of this pursuit. There are two ways to look at it: conlanging, as Henning writes, may be as common and as humanly creative as any kind of model-making, i.e., dollhouses, model trains, role-playing, or even the constructed cultures with city plans and maps in fantasy novels such as Terry Pratchett's Discworld. The Web is merely a means to bring enthusiasts together. Or it may provide a site that, with the impetus of competition and showmanship, encourages inutile and obsessive activity. Take your pick. From Hildegard von Bingen's Lingua Ignota to Dante's Inferno and the babbling Nimrod to John Dee's Enochian and on, invented languages have smacked of religious ecstacy, necromancy, pathology, and the demonic. Twin speech, or 'pathological idioglossia', was dramatised by Jodie Foster in Nell. Hannah Green's 'Language of Yr' was the invention of her schizophrenic protagonist in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Language itself is the centre of furious theoretical debate. Despite the inventive 'deformities' it is put to in poetry, punning, jest, singing, and lying, human language, our most 'natural' of technologies, is a social machine, used by multitudes and expected to get things done. It is expected of language that it be understood and that it have not only hearers but also answerers. All human production is founded on this assumption. A language without an audience of other speakers is no language. 'Why aren't you concentrating on real languages?' continues to be the most stinging criticism. Audience is essential to Wittgenstein's remark quoted at the beginning of this essay. Wittgenstein posits his 'private languages theory' as a kind of impossibility: all natural languages, because they exist by consensus, can only refer to private experience externally. Hence, a truly private language, devoted to naming 'feelings and moods' which the subject has never heard about or shared with others, is impossible among socialised speakers who are called upon to define subjective experience in public terms. His is a critique of solipsism, a charge often directed at language inventors. But very few conlangers that I have encountered are making private languages in Wittgenstein's sense, because most of them are interested in investing their private words with public meaning, even when they are doing it privately. For them, it is audience, deeply desireable, that has been impossible until now. Writing well before the development of CONLANG, Yaguello takes the stance that inventing a language is an act of madness. 'Just look at the lunatic in love with language', she writes: sitting in his book-lined study, he collects great piles of information, he collates and classifies it, he makes lists and fills card indexes. He is in the clutches of a denominatory delirium, of a taxonomic madness. He has to name everything, but before being able to name, he has to recognize and classify concepts, to enclose the whole Universe in a system of notation: produce enumerations, hierarchies, and paradigms. She is of course describing John Wilkins, whose Real Character and Universal Language in 1668 was an attempt to make each syllable of his every invented word denote its placement in a logical scheme of classification. 'A lunatic ambition', Yaguello pronounces, because it missed the essential quality of language: that its signs are arbitrary, practical, and changeable, so as to admit neologism and cultural difference. But Yaguello denounces auxiliary language makers in general as amateurs 'in love with language and with languages, and ignorant of the science of language'. Her example of 'feminine' invention comes from Helene Smith, the medium who claimed to be channeling Martian (badly disguised French). One conlanger noted that Yaguello's chapter entitled 'In Defence of Natural Languages' reminded him of the US Federal 'Defense of Marriage Act', whereby the institution of heterosexual marriage is 'defended' from hom*osexual marriage. Let hom*osexuals marry or lunatics invent language, and both marriage and English (or French) will come crashing to the ground. Schnapp praises Yaguello's work for being the most comprehensive examination of the phenomenon to date, but neither he nor she addresses linguist Suzette Haden Elgin's creative work on Láadan, a language designed for women, or even Quenya or Klingon -- languages that have acquired at least an audience of readers. Schnapp is less condemnatory than Yaguello, and interested in seeing language inventors as the 'philologists of imaginary worlds', 'nos semblables, nos frères, nos soeurs' -- after all. Like Yaguello, he is given to some generalities: imaginary languages are 'infantile': 'the result is always [my emphasis] an "impoverishment" of the natural languages in question: reduced to a limited set of open vowels [he means "open syllables"], prone to syllabic reduplication and to excessive syntactical parallelisms and symmetries'. To be sure, conlangs will never replicate the detail and history of a real language, but to call them 'impoverishments of the natural languages' seems as strange as calling dollhouses 'impoverishments of actual houses'. Why this perception of threat or diminishment? The critical, academic "audience" for language invention has come largely from non-language inventors and it is woefully uninformed. It is this audience that conlangers dislike the most: the outsiders who cannot understand what they are doing and who belittle it. The field, then, is open to re-examination, and the recent phenomenon of conlanging is evidence that the art of inventing languages is neither lunatic nor infantile. But if one is not Tolkien or a linguist supported by the fans of Star Trek, how does one justify the worthwhile nature of one's art? Is it even art if it has an audience of one ... its artist? Conlanging remains a highly specialised and technical pursuit that is, in the end, deeply subjective. Model builders and map-makers can expect their consumers to enjoy their products without having to participate in the minutia of their building. Not so the conlanger, whose consumer must internalise it, and who must understand and absorb complex linguistic concepts. It is different in the world of music. The Cocteau Twins, Bobby McFerrin in his Circle Songs, Lisa Gerrard in Duality, and the new group Ekova in Heaven's Dust all use 'nonsense' words set to music -- either to make songs that sound like exotic languages or to convey a kind of melodic glossolalia. Knowing the words is not important to their hearers, but few conlangers yet have that outlet, and must rely on text and graphs to give a sense of their language's structure. To this end, then, these are unheard, unaudienced languages, existing mostly on screen. A few conlangers have set their languages to music and recorded them. What they are doing, however, is decidedly different from the extempore of McFerrin. Their words mean something, and are carefully worked out lexically and grammatically. So What Are These Conlangs Like? On CONLANG and their links to Websites you will find information on almost every kind of no-language imaginable. Some sites are text only; some are lavishly illustrated, like the pages for Denden, or they feature a huge inventory of RealAudio and MP3 files, like The Kolagian Languages, or the songs of Teonaht. Some have elaborate scripts that the newest developments in fontography have been able to showcase. Some, like Tokana and Amman-Iar, are the result of decades of work and are immensely sophisticated. Valdyan has a Website with almost as much information about the 'conculture' as the conlang. Many are a posteriori languages, that is, variations on natural languages, like Brithenig (a mixture of the features of Brythonic and Romance languages); others are a priori -- starting from scratch -- like Elet Anta. Many conlangers strive to make their languages as different from European paradigms as possible. If imaginary languages are bricolages, as Schnapp writes, then conlangers are now looking to Tagalog, Basque, Georgian, Malagasay, and Aztec for ideas, instead of to Welsh, Finnish, and Hebrew, languages Tolkien drew upon for his Elvish. "Ergative" and "trigger" languages are often preferred to the "nominative" languages of Europe. Some people invent for sheer intellectual challenge; others for the beauty and sensuality of combining new and privately meaningful sounds. There are many calls for translation exercises, one of the most popular being 'The Tower of Babel' (Genesis 10: 1-9). The most recent innovation, and one that not only showcases these languages in all their variety but provides an incentive to learn another conlanger's conlang, is the Translation Relay Game: someone writes a short poem or composition in his or her language and sends it with linguistic information to someone else, who sends a translation with directions to the next in line all the way around again, like playing 'telephone'. The permutations that the Valdyan Starling Song went through give good evidence that these languages are not just relexes, or codes, of natural languages, but have their own linguistic, cultural, and poetic parameters of expression. They differ from real languages in one important respect that has bearing on my remarks about audience: very few conlangers have mastered their languages in the way one masters a native tongue. These creations are more like artefacts (several have compared it to poetry) than they are like languages. One does not live in a dollhouse. One does not normally think or speak in one's conlang, much less speak to another, except through a laborious process of translation. It remains to a longer cultural and sociolinguistic study (underway) to tease out the possibilities and problems of conlanging: why it is done, what does it satisfy, why so few women do it, what are its demographics, or whether it can be turned to pedagogical use in a 'hands-on', high- participation study of language. In this respect, CONLANG is one of the 'coolest' of on-line media. Only time will show what direction conlanging and attitudes towards it will take as the Internet becomes more powerful and widely used. Will the Internet democratise, and eventually make banal, a pursuit that has until now been painted with the romantic brush of lunacy and secrecy? (You can currently download LangMaker, invented by Jeff Henning, to help you construct your own language.) Or will it do the opposite and make language and linguistics -- so often avoided by students or reduced in university programs -- inventive and cutting edge? (The inventor of Tokana has used in-class language invention as a means to study language typology.) Now that we have it, the Internet at least provides conlangers with a place to hang their logodaedalic tapestries, and the technology for some of them to be heard. References Von Bingen, Hildegard. Lingua Ignota, or Wörterbuch der unbekannten Sprache. Eds. Marie-Louise Portmann and Alois Odermatt. Basel: Verlag Basler Hildegard-Gesellschaft, 1986. Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language. Trans. James Fentress. Oxford, England, and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995, 1997. Elgin, Suzette Haden. A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan. Madison, WI: Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science- Fiction, 1985. Henning, Jeffrey. Model Languages: The Newsletter Discussing Newly Imagined Words for Newly Imagined Worlds. <http://www.Langmaker.com/ml00.htm>. Kennaway, Richard. Some Internet Resources Relating to Constructed Languages. <http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/jrk/conlang.php>. (The most comprehensive list (with links) of invented languages on the Internet.) Layco*ck, Donald C. The Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Angelic Language as Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1994. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. Reprinted. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994. Salamon, Jeff. "Revenge of the Fanboys." Village Voice 13 Sep., 1994. Schnapp, Jeffrey. "Virgin Words: Hildegard of Bingen's Lingua Ignota and the Development of Imaginary Languages Ancient and Modern." Exemplaria 3.2 (1991): 267-98. Tolkien, J.R.R. "A Secret Vice." The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. 198-223. Wilkins, John. An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. Presented to the Royal Society of England in 1668. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 3rd ed. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958. Yaguello, Marina. Lunatic Lovers of Language: Imaginary Languages and Their Inventors. Trans. Catherine Slater. (Les fous du langage. 1985.) London: The Athlone Press, 1991. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sarah L. Higley. "Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on the Internet." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.php>. Chicago style: Sarah L. Higley, "Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on the Internet," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Sarah L. Higley. (2000) Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on the Internet. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.php> ([your date of access]).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Introduction Scholars, journalists, conspiracists, and public-facing groups have employed a variety of analogies to discuss the role that misleading content (conspiracy theory, disinformation, malinformation, and misinformation), plays in our everyday lives. Terms like the “disinformation war” (Hwang) or the “Infodemic” (United Nations) attempt to summarise the issues of misleading content to aide public understanding. This project studies the effectiveness of these analogies in conveying the movement of online conspiracy theory in social media networks by simulating them in a game. Building from growing comparisons likening conspiracy theories to game systems (Berkowitz; Kaminska), we used game design as a research tool to test these analogies against theory. This article focusses on the design process, rather than implementation, to explore where the analogies succeed and fail in replication. Background and Literature Review Conspiracy Theories and Games Online conspiracy theories reside in the milieu of misinformation (unintentionally incorrect), disinformation (intentionally incorrect), and malinformation (intentionally harmful) (Wardle and Derakhshan 45). They are puzzled together through the vast amount of information available online (Hannah 1) creating a “hunt” for truth (Berkowitz) that refracts information through deeply personal narratives that create paradoxical interpretations (Hochschild xi). Modern social media networks offer curated but fragmented content distribution where information discovery involves content finding users through biased sources (Toff and Nielsen 639). This puzzling together of theories gives conspiracy theorists agency in ‘finding the story’, giving them agency in a process with underlining goals (Kaminska). A contemporary example is QAnon, where the narrative of a “secret global cabal”, large-scale pedophile rings, and overstepping government power is pieced together through Q-drops or cryptic clues that users decipher (Bloom and Moskalenko 5). This puzzle paints a seemingly hidden reality for players to uncover (Berkowitz) and offers gripping engagement which connects “disparate data” into a visualised conspiracy (Hannah 3). Despite their harmful impacts, conspiracy theories are playful (Sobo). They can be likened to playful acts of make-belief (Sobo), reality-adjacent narratives that create puzzles for exploration (Berkowitz), and community building through playful discovery (Bloom and Moskalenko 169). Not only do conspiracies “game the algorithm” to promote content, but they put players into in a self-made digital puzzle (Bloom and Moskalenko 17, 18). This array of human and nonhuman actors allows for truth-spinning that can push people towards conspiracy through social bonds (Moskalenko). Mainstream media and academic institutions are seen as biased and flawed information sources, prompting these users to “do their own research” within these spaces (Ballantyne and Dunning). However, users are in fragmented worldviews, not binaries of right and wrong, which leaves journalism and fact-checkers in a digital world that requires complex intervention (De Maeyer 22). Analogies Analogies are one method of intervention. They offer explanation for the impact conspiracy has had on society, such as the polarisation of families (Andrews). Both conspiracists and public-facing groups have commonly used an analogy of war. The recent pandemic has also introduced analogies of virality (Hwang; Tardáguila et al.). A war analogy places truth on a battleground against lies and fiction. “Doing your own research” is a combat maneuver for conspiracy proliferation through community engagement (Ballantyne and Dunning). Similarly, those fighting digital conspiracies have embraced the analogy to explain the challenges and repercussions of content. War suggests hardened battlelines, the need for public mobilisation, and a victory where truth prevails, or defeat where fallacy reigns (Shackelford). Comparatively, a viral analogy, or “Infodemic” (United Nations), suggests misleading content as moving through a network like an infectious system; spreading through paths of least resistance or effective contamination (Scales et al. 678; Graham et al. 22). Battlelines are replaced with paths or invasion, where the goal is to infect the system or construct a rapid response vaccine that can stymie the ever-growing disease (Tardáguila et al.). In both cases, victorious battles or curative vaccinations frame conspiracy and disinformation as temporary problems. The idea of the rise and falls of a conspiracy’s prominence as link to current events emulates Byung-Chung Han’s notion of the digital swarm, or fragmented communities that coalesce, bubble up into volatile noise, and then dissipate without addressing the “dominant power relations” (Han 12). For Han, swarms arise in digital networks with intensive support before disappearing, holding an influential but ephemeral life. Recently, scholarship has applied a media ecology lens to recognise the interconnection of actors that contribute to these swarms. The digital-as-ecosystem approach suggests a network that needs to be actively managed (Milner and Phillips 8). Tangherlini et al.’s work on conspiracy pipelines highlights the various actors that move information through them to make the digital ecosystem healthy or unhealthy (Tangherlini et al.). Seeing the Internet, and the movement of information on it, as an ecology posits a consideration of processes that are visible (i.e., conspiracy theorists) and invisible (i.e., algorithms etc.) and is inclusive of human and non-human actors (Milner and Phillips). With these analogies as frames, we answer Sobo’s call for a playful lens towards conspiracy alongside De Maeyer’s request for serious interventions by using serious play. If we can recognise both conspiracy and its formation as game-like and understand these analogies as explanatory narratives, we can use simulation game design to ask: how are these systems of conspiracy propagation being framed? What gaps in understanding arise when we frame conspiracy theory through the analogies used to describe it? Method Research-Creation and Simulation Gaming Our use of game design methods reframed analogies through “gaming literacy”, which considers the knowledge put into design and positions the game as a set of practices relating to the everyday (Zimmerman 24). This process requires constant reflection. In both the play of the game and the construction of its parts we employed Khaled’s critical design framework (10-11). From March to December 2021 we kept reflective logs, notes from bi-weekly team meetings, playtest observations, and archives of our visual design to consistently review and reassess our progression. We asked how the visuals, mechanics, and narratives point to the affordances and drawbacks of these analogies. Visual and Mechanical Design Before designing the details of the analogies, we had to visualise their environment – networked social media. We took inspiration from existing visual representations of the Internet and social media under the hypothesis that employing a familiar conceptual model could improve the intelligibility of the game (figs. 1 and 2). In usability design, this is referred to as "Jakob's law" (Nielsen), in which, by following familiar patterns, the user can focus better on content, or in our case, play. Fig. 1: “My Twitter Social Ego Networks” by David Sousa-Rodrigues. A visual representation of Sousa-Rodrigues’s social media network. <https://www.flickr.com/photos/11452351@N00/2048034334>. We focussed on the networked publics (Itō) that coalesce around information and content disclosure. We prioritised data practices that influence community construction through content (Bloom and Moskalenko 57), and the larger conspiracy pipelines of fragmented data (Tangherlini et al. 30). Fig. 2: "The Internet Map" by Ruslan Enikeev. A visual, 2D, interactive representation of the Internet. <http://internet-map.net/>. Our query focusses on how play reciprocated, or failed to reciprocate, these analogies. Sharp et al.’s suggestion that obvious and simple models are intuitively understood allowed us to employ simplification in design in the hopes of parsing down complex social media systems. Fig. 3 highlights this initial attempt where social media platforms became “networks” that formed proximity to specific groups or “nodes”. Fig. 3: Early version of the game board, with a representation of nodes and networks as simplified visualisations for social networks. This simplification process guided the scaling of design as we tried to make the seemingly boundless online networks accessible. Colourful tokens represented users, placed on the nodes (fig. 4). Tokens represented portions of the user base, allowing players to see the proliferation of conspiracy through the network. Unfortunately, this simplification ignores the individual acts of users and their ability to bypass these pipelines as well as the discovery-driven collegiality within these communities (Bloom and Moskalenko 57). To help offset this, we designed an overarching scenario and included “flavour text” on cards (fig. 5) which offered narrative vignettes that grounded player actions in dynamic story. Fig. 4: The first version for the printed playtest for the board, with the representation of “networks” formed by a clustering of "nodes". The movement of conspiracy was indicated by colour-coded tokens. Fig. 5: Playing cards. They reference a particular action which typically adds or removes token. They also reference a theory and offer text to narrativise the action. Design demonstrates that information transmission is not entirely static. In the most recent version (fig. 6), this meant having the connections between nodes become subverted through player actions. Game mechanics, such as playing cards (fig. 5), make these pipelines interactive and visible by allowing players to place and move content throughout the space in response to each other’s actions. Fig. 6: The most updated version of the board, now named "Lizards and Lies". Red regions are initial starting points for conspiracy to enter mainstream social media (purple). Design adaptations focussed on making conspiracy theory dynamic. Player choice (i.e. where to add conspiracy) had to consider a continuously changing board created by other actors to reflect the adaptive nature of conspiracy theories. In this way, analogies came alive or died through the actions of players within a visually responsive system. This meant that each game had different swarms of conspiracy, where player decisions “wrote” a narrative through play. By selecting how and where conspiracy might be placed or removed, players created a narrative distinct to their game. For example, a conspiracy theorist player (one playable character) might explain their placing of conspiracy theory within the Chrpr/Twitter network as a community response to fact-checking (second playable character) in the neighbouring Shreddit/Reddit community. Results War Analogy Initial design took inspiration from wargaming to consider battlelines, various combatants, and a simulated conflict. Two player characters were made. Conspiracy theorists were posited against fact-checkers, where nodes and networks functioned as battlelines of intervention. The war narrative was immediately challenged by the end-state. Either conspiracy overtook networks or the fact checkers completely stymied conspiracy’s ability to exist. Both end-states seemed wrong for players. Battle consistently felt futile as conspiracists could always add more content, and fact-checkers could always remove something. Simply put, war fell flat. While the game could depict communities and spaces of combat, it struggled to represent how fragmented conspiracy theories are. In play, conspiracy theory became stagnant, the flow of information felt compelled, and the actors entered uneven dynamics. Utopia was never achieved, and war always raged on. Even when players did overtake a network, the victory condition (needing to control the most networks) made this task, which would normally be compelling, feel lacklustre. To address this, we made changes. We altered the win condition to offer points at the end of each turn depending on what the player did (i.e., spreading conspiracy into networks). We expanded the number of networks and connections between them (fig. 3 and fig. 6) to include more fluid and fragmented pipelines of conspiracy dissemination. We included round-end events which shifted the state of the game based on other actors, and we pushed players to focus on their own actions more than those of the others on the board. These changes naturally shifted the battleground from hardened battle lines to a fragmented amorphous spread of disinformation; it moved war to virality. Viral Analogy As we transitioned towards the viral, we prioritised the reflexive, ephemeral movements of conspiracy proliferating through networks. We focussed less on adding and removing content and shifted to the movement of actors through the space. Some communities became more susceptible to conspiracy content, fact-checkers relied on flagging systems, and conspiracy theories followed a natural, but unexpected pipeline of content dissemination. These changes allowed players to feel like individual actors with specific goals rather than competing forces. Fact-checkers relied on mitigation and response while conspiracists evaluated the susceptibility of specific communities to conspiracy content. This change illuminated a core issue with fact-checking; it is entirely responsive, endless, and too slow to stop content from having an impact. While conspiracists could play one card to add content, fact-checkers had to flag content, move their token, and use a player card to eliminate content – all of which exacerbated this issue. In this manner, the viral approach rearticulated how systems themselves afford the spread of conspiracy, where truly effective means to stop the spread relied on additional system actors, such as training algorithms to help remove and flag content. While a more effective simulation, the viral analogy struggled in its presentation of conspiracy theory within social media. Play had a tipping point, where given enough resources, those stopping the spread of conspiracy could “vaccinate” it and clean the board. To alter this, our design began to consider actions and reactions, creating a push and pull of play focussed on balancing or offsetting the system. This transition naturally made us consider a media ecology analogy. Media Ecology Replacing utopic end-states with a need to maintain network health reframed the nature of engagement within this simulation. An ecological model recognises that harmful content will exist in a system and aims not at elimination, but at maintaining a sustainable balance. It is responsive. It considers the various human and non-human actors at play and focusses on varied actor goals. As our game shifted to an ecological model, hom*ogenous actors of conspiracists or fact-checkers were expanded. We transitioned a two-player game into a four-player variant, testing options like literacy educators, content recommending algorithms, and ‘edgelords'. Rather than defeating or saving social media, play becomes focussed on actors in the system. Play and design demonstrated how actions would shape play decisions. Characters were seen as network actors rather than enemies, changing interaction. Those spreading conspiracy began to focus less on “viral paths”, or lines of battle, and instead on where or how they could impact system health. In some cases, conspiracists would build one network of support, in others they created pockets around the board from which they could run campaigns. Those stopping the spread came to see their job as management. Rather than try and eliminate all conspiracy, they determined which sites to engage with, what content held the greatest threat, and which tools would be most effective. Media ecology play focussed less on outsmarting opponents and instead on managing an actor’s, and other players’, goals within an evolving system. Challenging Swarms and a Turn to Digital Ecology Using games to evaluate analogies illuminates clear gaps in their use, and the value of a media ecology lens. A key issue across the two main analogies (war and virality) was a utopic endstate. The idea that conspiracy can be beaten back, or vaccinated, fails to consider the endless amount of conspiracy possible to be made, or the impossibility of vaccinating the entire system. As our transitionary design process shows, the notion of winners and losers misplaces the intent of various actors groups where conspiracy is better framed as community-building rather than “controlling” a space (Bloom and Moskalenko 57). In design, while Han’s notion of the swarm was helpful, it struggled to play out in our simulations because fragments of conspiracy always remained on the board. This lingering content suggests that fact-checking does not actually remove ideological support. Swarms could quickly regrow around lingering support presenting them not as ephemeral as Han argued. As design transitioned towards ecology, these “fragments” were seen as part of a system of actors. Gameplay shows a deep interplay between the removal of content and its spread, arguing that removing conspiracy is a band-aid solution to a larger problem. Our own simplification of analogy into a game is not without limitations. Importantly, the impact of user specific acts for interpreting a movement (Toff and Nielsen 640), and the underlying set of networks that create “dark platforms” (Zeng and Schäfer 122) were lost in the game’s translation. Despite this, our work provides directions for scholarship and those engaging with the public on these issues to consider. Reframing our lens to understand online conspiracy as an aspect of digital ecological health, asks us to move away from utopic solutions and instead focus on distinct actors as they relate to the larger system. Conclusion Employing serious play as a lens to our framing of digital conspiracy, this project emphasises a turn towards media ecology models. Game design functioned as a tool to consider the actors, behaviours, and interactions of a system. Our methodological approach for visualising war and viral analogies demonstrates how playful responses can prompt questions and considerations of theory. Playing in this way, offers new insights for how we think about and grapple with the various actors associated with conspiracy theory and scholarship should continue to embrace ecological models to weigh the assemblage of actors. References Andrews, Travis. “QAnon Is Tearing Families Apart.” Washington Post, 2020. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/14/qanon-families-support-group/>. Ballantyne, Nathan, and David Dunning. “Skeptics Say, ‘Do Your Own Research.’ It’s Not That Simple.” The New York Times, 3 Jan. 2022. <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/opinion/dyor-do-your-own-research.html>. Berkowitz, Reed. “QAnon Resembles the Games I Design. But for Believers, There Is No Winning.” Washington Post, 2021. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/qanon-game-plays-believers/2021/05/10/31d8ea46-928b-11eb-a74e-1f4cf89fd948_story.html>. Bloom, Mia, and Sophia Moskalenko. Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford University Press, 2021. De Maeyer, Juliette. “Taking Conspiracy Culture Seriously: Journalism Needs to Face Its Epistemological Trouble.” Journalism 20.1 (2019): 21–23. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918807037>. Graham, Timothy, et al. Like a Virus: The Coordinated Spread of Coronavirus Disinformation. The Australia Institute, 2020. <https://apo.org.au/node/305864>. Han, Byung-Chul. In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. Trans. Erik Butler. MIT Press, 2017. Hannah, Matthew N. “A Conspiracy of Data: QAnon, Social Media, and Information Visualization.” Social Media + Society, 7.3 (2021). <https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211036064>. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The New Press, 2016. Hwang, Tim. “Deconstructing the Disinformation War.” MediaWell, Social Science Research Council 1 June 2020. <https://mediawell.ssrc.org/expert-reflections/deconstructing-the-disinformation-war/>. Itō, Mizuko. “Introduction.” Networked Publics. Ed. Kazys Varnelis. MIT Press, 2008. Kaminska, Izabella. “The ‘Game Theory’ in the Qanon Conspiracy Theory.” Financial Times 16 Oct. 2020. <https://www.ft.com/content/74f9d20f-9ff9-4fad-808f-c7e4245a1725>. Khaled, Rilla. “Questions over Answers: Reflective Game Design.” Playful Disruption of Digital Media. Ed. Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath. Singapore: Springer, 2018. 3–27. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1891-6_1>. Milner, Ryan M., and Whitney Phillips. You Are Here. MIT Press, 2020. <https://you-are-here.pubpub.org/>. Moskalenko, Sophia. “Evolution of QAnon & Radicalization by Conspiracy Theories.” The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare 4.2 (2021): 109–14. <https://doi.org/10.21810/jicw.v4i2.3756>. Nielsen, Jakob. “End of Web Design.” Nielsen Norman Group, 2000. <https://www.nngroup.com/articles/end-of-web-design/>. Scales, David, et al. “The Covid-19 Infodemic — Applying the Epidemiologic Model to Counter Misinformation.” New England Journal of Medicine 385.8 (2021): 678–81. <https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp2103798>. Shackelford, Scott. “The Battle against Disinformation Is Global.” The Conversation 2020. <http://theconversation.com/the-battle-against-disinformation-is-global-129212>. Sharp, Helen, et al. Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. 5th ed. Wiley, 2019. Sobo, Elisa Janine. “Playing with Conspiracy Theories.” Anthropology News 31 July 2019. <https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/playing-with-conspiracy-theories/>. Tangherlini, Timothy R., et al. “An Automated Pipeline for the Discovery of Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theory Narrative Frameworks: Bridgegate, Pizzagate and Storytelling on the Web.” PLoS ONE 15.6 (2020). <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0233879>. Tardáguila, Cristina, et al. “Taking an Ecological Approach to Misinformation.” Poynter 5 Dec. 2019. <https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2019/taking-an-ecological-approach-to-misinformation/>. Toff, Benjamin, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. “‘I Just Google It’: Folk Theories of Distributed Discovery.” Journal of Communication 68.3 (2018): 636–57. <https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy009>. United Nations. “UN Tackles ‘Infodemic’ of Misinformation and Cybercrime in COVID-19 Crisis.” 2020. <https://www.un.org/en/un-coronavirus-communications-team/un-tackling-%E2%80%98infodemic%E2%80%99-misinformation-and-cybercrime-covid-19>. Wardle, Claire, and Hossein Derakhshan. “Thinking about ‘Information Disorder’: Formats of Misinformation, Disinformation, and Mal-Information.” Journalism, ‘Fake News’ & Disinformation. Eds. Cherilyn Ireton and Julie Posetti. Paris: Unesco, 2018. 43–54. Zeng, Jing, and Mike S. Schäfer. “Conceptualizing ‘Dark Platforms’. Covid-19-Related Conspiracy Theories on 8kun and Gab.” Digital Journalism 9.9 (2021): 1321–43. <https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1938165>. Zimmerman, Eric. “Gaming Literacy: Game Design as a Model for Literacy in the Twenty-First Century.” The Video Game Theory Reader 2. 2008. 9.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods. Mark Weiser on ubiquitous computing (21st Century Computer 104) In 2007, a forum entitled HCI 2020: Human Values in a Digital Age sought to address the questions: What will our world be like in 2020? Digital technologies will continue to proliferate, enabling ever more ways of changing how we live. But will such developments improve the quality of life, empower us, and make us feel safer, happier and more connected? Or will living with technology make it more tiresome, frustrating, angst-ridden, and security-driven? What will it mean to be human when everything we do is supported or augmented by technology? (Harper et al. 10) The forum came as a response to, what many call, post-PC technological developments; developments that seek to engulf our lives in digital technologies which in their various forms are meant to support and augment our everyday lives. One of these developments has been the project of ubiquitous computing along with its kin project, tangible computing. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) made its appearance in the late 1980s in the labs of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) as the “third wave” in computing, following those of the mainframe and personal computing (Weiser, Open House 2). Mark Weiser, who coined the term, along with his collaborators at Xerox PARC, envisioned a “new technological paradigm” which would leave behind the traditional one-to-one relationship between human and computer, and spread computation “ubiquitously, but invisibly, throughout the environment” (Weiser, Gold and Brown 693). Since then, the field has grown and now counts several peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and academic and industrial research centres around the world, which have set out to study the new “post-PC computing” under names such as Pervasive Computing, Ambient Intelligence, Tangible Computing, The Internet of Things, etc. Instead of providing a comprehensive account of all the different ubicomp incarnations, this paper seeks to focus on the early projects and writings of some of ubicomp’s most prominent figures and tease out, as a way of critique, the origins of some of its romantic promises. From the outset, ubiquitous computing was heavily informed by a human-centred approach that sought to shift the focus from the personal computer back to its users. On the grounds that the PC has dominated the technological landscape at the expense of its human counterparts, ubiquitous computing promised a different human-machine interaction, with “machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs” (104, my italics) placing the two in opposite and antagonistic terrains. The problem comes about in the form of interaction between people and machines … So when the two have to meet, which side should dominate? In the past, it has been the machine that dominates. In the future, it should be the human. (Norman 140) Within these early ubicomp discourses, the computer came to embody a technological menace, the machine that threatened the liberal humanist value of being free and in control. For example, in 1999 in a book that was characterized as “the bible of ‘post-PC’ thinking” by Business Week, Donald Norman exclaimed: we have let ourselves to be trapped. … I don’t want to be controlled by a technology. I just want to get on with my life, … So down with PC’s; down with computers. All they do is complicate our lives. (72) And we read on the website of MIT’s first ubicomp project Oxygen: For over forty years, computation has centered about machines, not people. We have catered to expensive computers, pampering them in air-conditioned rooms or carrying them around with us. Purporting to serve us, they have actually forced us to serve them. Ubiquitous computing then, in its early incarnations, was presented as the solution; the human-centred, somewhat natural approach, which would shift the emphasis away from the machine and bring control back to its legitimate owner, the liberal autonomous human subject, becoming the facilitator of our apparently threatened humanness. Its promise? An early promise of regressive augmentation, I would say, since it promised to augment our lives, not by changing them, but by returning us to a past, better world that the alienating PC has supposedly displaced, enabling us to “have more time to be more fully human” (Weiser and Brown). And it sought to achieve this through the key characteristic of invisibility, which was based on the paradox that while more and more computers will permeate our lives, they will effectively disappear. Ubicomp’s Early Romantic Promises The question of how we can make computers disappear has been addressed in computer research in various ways. One of the earliest and most prominent of these is the approach, which focuses on the physicality of the world seeking to build tangible interfaces. One of the main advocates of this approach is MIT’s Tangible Media Group, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii. The group has been working on their vision, which they call “Tangible Bits,” for almost two decades now, and in 2009 they were awarded the “Lasting Impact Award” at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) for their metaDesk platform, presented in 1997 (fig.1), which explores the coupling of everyday physical objects with digital information (Ullmer and Ishii). Also, in 2004 in a special paper titled “Bottles: A Transparent Interface as a Tribute to Mark Weiser”, Ishii presented once again an early project he and his group developed in 1999, and for which they were personally commented by Weiser himself. According to Ishii, bottles (fig. 2)—a system which comprises three glass bottles “filled with music” each representing a different musical instrument, placed on a Plexiglas “stage” and controlled by their physical manipulation (moving, opening or closing them)—no less, “illustrates Mark Weiser’s vision of the transparent (or invisible) interface that weaves itself into the fabric of everyday life” (1299). Figure 1: metaDesk platform (MIT Tangible Media Group) Figure 2: musicBottles (MIT Tangible Media Group) Tangible computing was based on the premise that we inhabit two worlds: the physical world and cyberspace, or as Ishii and Ullmer put it, the world of atoms and the world of bits claiming that there is gap between these two worlds that left us “torn between these parallel but disjoint spaces” (1). This agreed with Weiser’s argument that cyberspace, and specifically the computer, has taken centre stage leaving the real world—the real people, the real interactions—in the background and neglected. Tangible computing then sought to address this problem by "bridging the gaps between both cyberspace and the physical environment" (1). As Ishii and Ullmer wrote in 1997: The aim of our research is to show concrete ways to move beyond the current dominant model of GUI [Graphic User Interface] bound to computers with a flat rectangular display, windows, a mouse, and a keyboard. To make computing truly ubiquitous and invisible, we seek to establish a new type of HCI that we call "Tangible User Interfaces" (TUIs). TUIs will augment the real physical world by coupling digital information to everyday physical objects and environments. (2) “Our intention is to take advantage of natural physical affordances to achieve a heightened legibility and seamlessness of interaction between people and information” (2). In his earlier work computer scientist Paul Dourish turned to phenomenology and the concept of embodiment in order to develop an understanding of interaction as embodied. This was prior to his recent work with cultural anthropologist Bell where they examined the motivating mythology of ubiquitous computing along with the messiness of its lived experience (Dourish and Bell). Dourish, in this earlier work observed that one of the common critical features early tangible and ubiquitous computing shared is that “they both attempt to exploit our natural familiarity with the everyday environment and our highly developed spatial and physical skills to specialize and control how computation can be used in concert with naturalistic activities” (Context-Aware Computing 232). They then sought to exploit this familiarity in order to build natural computational interfaces that fit seamlessly within our everyday, real world (Where the Action Is 17). This idea of an existing set of natural tactile skills appears to come hand-in-hand with a nostalgic, romantic view of an innocent, simple, and long gone world that the early projects of tangible and ubiquitous computing sought to revive; a world where the personal computer not only did not fit, an innocent world in fact displaced by the personal computer. In 1997, Ishii and Ullmer wrote about their decision to start their investigations about the “future of HCI” in the museum of the Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments at Harvard University in their efforts to get inspired by “the aesthetics and rich affordances of these historical scientific instruments” concerned that, “alas, much of this richness has been lost to the rapid flood of digital technologies” (1). Elsewhere Ishii explained that the origin of his idea to design a bottle interface began with the concept of a “weather forecast bottle;” an idea he intended to develop as a present for his mother. “Upon opening the weather bottle, she would be greeted by the sound of singing birds if the next day’s weather was forecasted to be clear” (1300). Here, we are introduced to a nice elderly lady who has opened thousands of bottles while cooking for her family in her kitchen. This senior lady; who is made to embody the symbolic alignment between woman, the domestic and nature (see Soper, Rose, Plumwood); “has never clicked a mouse, typed a URL, nor booted a computer in her life” (Ishii 1300). Instead, “my mother simply wanted to know the following day’s weather forecast. Why should this be so complicated?” (1300, my italics). Weiser also mobilised nostalgic sentiments in order to paint a picture of what it would be to live with ubiquitous computing. So, for example, when seeking a metaphor for ubiquitous computing, he proposed “childhood – playful, a building of foundations, constant learning, a bit mysterious and quickly forgotten by adults” (Not a Desktop 8). He viewed the ubicomp home as the ideal retreat to a state of childhood; playfully reaching out to the unknown, while being securely protected and safely “at home” (Open House). These early ideas of a direct experience of the world through our bodily senses along with the romantic view of a past, simple, and better world that the computer threatened and that future technological developments promised, could point towards what Leo Marx has described as America’s “pastoral ideal”, a force that, according to Marx, is ingrained in the American view of life. Balancing between primitivism and civilisation, nature and culture, the pastoral ideal “is an embodiment of what Lovejoy calls ‘semi-primitivism’; it is located in a middle ground somewhere ‘between’, yet in a transcendent relation to, the opposing forces of civilisation and nature” (Marx 23). It appears that the early advocates of tangible and ubiquitous computing sought to strike a similar balance to the American pastoral ideal; a precarious position that managed to reconcile the disfavour and fear of Europe’s “satanic mills” with an admiration for the technological power of the Industrial Revolution, the admiration for technological development with the bucolic ideal of an unspoiled and pure nature. But how was such a balance to be achieved? How could the ideal middle state be achieved balancing the opposing forces of technological development and the dream of the return to a serene pastoral existence? According to Leo Marx, for the European colonisers, the New World was to provide the answer to this exact question (101). The American landscape was to become the terrain where old and new, nature and technology harmonically meet to form a libertarian utopia. Technology was seen as “‘naturally arising’ from the landscape as another natural ‘means of happiness’ decreed by the Creator in his design of the continent. So, far from conceding that there might be anything alien or ‘artificial’ about mechanization, technology was seen as inherent in ‘nature’; both geographic and human” (160). Since then, according to Marx, the idea of the “return” to a new Golden Age has been engrained in the American culture and it appears that it informs ubiquitous computing’s own early visions. The idea of a “naturally arising” technology which would facilitate our return to the once lost garden of security and nostalgia appears to have become a common theme within ubiquitous computing discourses making appearances across time and borders. So, for example, while in 1991 Weiser envisioned that ubiquitous technologies will make “using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods” (21st Century Computer 11), twelve years later Marzano writing about Philip’s vision of Ambient Intelligence promised that “the living space of the future could look more like that of the past than that of today” (9). While the pastoral defined nature in terms of the geographical landscape, early ubiquitous computing appeared to define nature in terms of the objects, tools and technologies that surround us and our interactions with them. While pastoral America defined itself in contradistinction to the European industrial sites and the dirty, smoky and alienating cityscapes, within those early ubiquitous computing discourses the role of the alienating force was assigned to the personal computer. And whereas the personal computer with its “grey box” was early on rejected as the modern embodiment of the European satanic mills, computation was welcomed as a “naturally arising” technological solution which would infuse the objects which, “through the ages, … are most relevant to human life—chairs, tables and beds, for instance, … the objects we can’t do without” (Marzano 9). Or else, it would infuse the—newly constructed—natural landscape fulfilling the promise that when the “world of bits” and the “world of atoms” are finally bridged, the balance will be restored. But how did these two worlds come into existence? How did bits and atoms come to occupy different and separate ontological spheres? Far from being obvious or commonsensical, the idea of the separation between bits and atoms has a history that grounds it to specific times and places, and consequently makes those early ubiquitous and tangible computing discourses part of a bigger story that, as documented (Hayles) and argued (Agre), started some time ago. The view that we inhabit the two worlds of atoms and bits (Ishii and Ullmer) was endorsed by both early ubiquitous and tangible computing, it was based on the idea of the separation of computation from its material instantiation, presenting the former as a free floating entity able to infuse our world. As we saw earlier, tangible computing took the idea of this separation as an unquestionable fact, which then served as the basis for its research goals. As we read in the home page of the Tangible Media Group’s website: Where the sea of bits meets the land of atoms, we are now facing the challenge of reconciling our dual citizenship in the physical and digital worlds. "Tangible Bits" is our vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI): we seek a seamless coupling of bits and atoms by giving physical form to digital information and computation (my italics). The idea that digital information does not have to have a physical form, but is given one in order to achieve a coupling of the two worlds, not only reinforces the view of digital information as an immaterial entity, but also places it in a privileged position against the material world. Under this light, those early ideas of augmentation or of “awakening” the physical world (Ishii and Ullmer 3) appear to be based on the idea of a passive material world that can be brought to life and become worthy and meaningful through computation, making ubiquitous computing part of a bigger and more familiar story. Restaging the dominant Cartesian dualism between the “ensouled” subject and the “soulless” material object, the latter is rendered passive, manipulable, and void of agency and, just like Ishii’s old bottles, it is performed as a mute, docile “empty vessel” ready to carry out any of its creator’s wishes; hold perfumes and beverages, play music, or tell the weather. At the same time, computation was presented as the force that could breathe life to a mundane and passive world; a free floating, somewhat natural, immaterial entity, like oxygen (hence the name of MIT’s first ubicomp project), like the air we breathe that could travel unobstructed through any medium, our everyday objects and our environment. But it is interesting to see that in those early ubicomp discourses computation’s power did not extend too far. While computation appeared to be foregrounded as a powerful, almost magic, entity able to give life and soul to a soulless material world, at the same time it was presented as controlled and muted. The computational power that would fill our lives, according to Weiser’s ubiquitous computing, would be invisible, it wouldn’t “intrude on our consciousness” (Weiser Not a Desktop 7), it would leave no traces and bring no radical changes. If anything, it would enable us to re-establish our humanness and return us to our past, natural state promising not to change us, or our lives, by introducing something new and unfamiliar, but to enable us to “remain serene and in control” (Weiser and Brown). In other words, ubiquitous computing, as this early story goes, would not be alienating, complex, obtrusive, or even noticeable, for that matter, and so, at the end of this paper, we come full circle to ubicomp’s early goals of invisibility with its underpinnings of the precarious pastoral ideal. This short paper focused on some of ubicomp’s early stories and projects and specifically on its promise to return us to a past and implicitly better world that the PC has arguably displaced. By reading these early promises of, what I call, regressive augmentation through Marx’s work on the “pastoral ideal,” this paper sought to tease out, in order to unsettle, the origins of some of ubicomp’s romantic promises. References Agre, P. E. Computation and Human Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Dourish, P. “Seeking a Foundation for Context-Aware Computing.” Human–Computer Interaction 16.2-4 (2001): 229-241. ———. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Dourish, P. and Genevieve Bell. Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011.Grimes, A., and R. Harper. “Celebratory Technology: New Directions for Food Research in HCI.” In CHI’08, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 2008. 467-476. Harper, R., T. Rodden, Y. Rogers, and A. Sellen (eds.). Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020. Microsoft Research, 2008. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/Cambridge/projects/hci2020/downloads/BeingHuman_A3.pdf›. Hayles, K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ishii, H. “Bottles: A Transparent Interface as a Tribute to Mark Weiser.” IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems 87.6 (2004): 1299-1311. Ishii, H., and B. Ullmer. “Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms.” In CHI ’97, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 1997. 234-241. Marx, L. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 35th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Marzano, S. “Cultural Issues in Ambient Intelligence”. In E. Aarts and S. Marzano (eds.), The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2003. Norman, D. The Invisible Computer: Why Good Oroducts Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Plumwood, V. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London, New York: Routledge, 1993. Rose, G. Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. Soper, K. “Naturalised Woman and Feminized Nature.” In L. Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2000. Ullmer, B., and H. Ishii. “The metaDESK: Models and Prototypes for Tangible User Interfaces.” In UIST '97, Proceedings of the 10th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. New York: ACM, 1997. 223-232. Weiser, M. “The Computer for the 21st Century." Scientific American 265.3 (1991): 94-104. ———. “The Open House.” ITP Review 2.0, 1996. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://makingfurnitureinteractive.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/wholehouse.pdf›. ———. “The World Is Not a Desktop." Interactions 1.1 (1994): 7-8. Weiser, M., and J.S. Brown. “The Coming Age of Calm Technology.” 1996. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.johnseelybrown.com/calmtech.pdf›. Weiser, M., R. Gold, and J.S. Brown. “The Origins of Ubiquitous Computing at PARC in the Late 80s.” Pervasive Computing 38 (1999): 693-696.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

As the single most successful social-networking Website to date, Facebook has caused a shift in both practice and perception of online socialisation, and its relationship to the offline world. While not the first online social networking service, Facebook’s user base dwarfs its nearest competitors. Mark Zuckerberg’s creation boasts more than 750 million users (Facebook). The currently ailing MySpace claimed a ceiling of 100 million users in 2006 (Cashmore). Further, the accuracy of this number has been contested due to a high proportion of fake or inactive accounts. Facebook by contrast, claims 50% of its user base logs in at least once a day (Facebook). The popular and mainstream uptake of Facebook has shifted social use of the Internet from various and fragmented niche groups towards a common hub or portal around which much everyday Internet use is centred. The implications are many, but this paper will focus on the progress what Mimi Marinucci terms the “Facebook effect” (70) and the evolution of lists as a filtering mechanism representing one’s social zones within Facebook. This is in part inspired by the launch of Google’s new social networking service Google+ which includes “circles” as a fundamental design feature for sorting contacts. Circles are an acknowledgement of the shortcomings of a single, unified friends list that defines the Facebook experience. These lists and circles are both manifestations of the same essential concept: our social lives are, in fact, divided into various zones not defined by an online/offline dichotomy, by fantasy role-play, deviant sexual practices, or other marginal or minority interests. What the lists and circles demonstrate is that even very common, mainstream people occupy different roles in everyday life, and that to be effective social tools, social networking sites must grant users control over their various identities and over who knows what about them. Even so, the very nature of computer-based social tools lead to problematic definitions of identities and relationships using discreet terms, in contrast to more fluid, performative constructions of an individual and their relations to others. Building the Monolith In 1995, Sherry Turkle wrote that “the Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life” (180). Turkle describes the various deliberate acts of personnae creation possible online in contrast to earlier constraints placed upon the “cycling through different identities” (179). In the past, Turkle argues, “lifelong involvement with families and communities kept such cycling through under fairly stringent control” (180). In effect, Turkle was documenting the proliferation of identity games early adopters of Internet technologies played through various means. Much of what Turkle focused on were MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and MOOs (MUD Object Oriented), explicit play-spaces that encouraged identity-play of various kinds. Her contemporary Howard Rheingold focused on what may be described as the more “true to life” communities of the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) (1–38). In particular, Rheingold explored a community established around the shared experience of parenting, especially of young children. While that community was not explicitly built on the notion of role-play, the parental identity was an important quality of community members. Unlike contemporary social media networks, these early communities were built on discreet platforms. MUDs, MOOs, Bulletin Board Systems, UseNet Groups and other early Internet communication platforms were generally hosted independently of one another, and even had to be dialled into via modem separately in some cases (such as the WELL). The Internet was a truly disparate entity in 1995. The discreetness of each community supported the cordoning off of individual roles or identities between them. Thus, an individual could quite easily be “Pete” a member of the parental WELL group and “Gorak the Destroyer,” a role-player on a fantasy MUD without the two roles ever being associated with each other. As Turkle points out, even within each MUD ample opportunity existed to play multiple characters (183–192). With only a screen name and associated description to identify an individual within the MUD environment, nothing technical existed to connect one player’s multiple identities, even within the same community. As the Internet has matured, however, the tendency has been shifting towards monolithic hubs, a notion of collecting all of “the Internet” together. From a purely technical and operational perspective, this has led to the emergence of the ISP (Internet service provider). Users can make a connection to one point, and then be connected to everything “on the Net” instead of individually dialling into servers and services one at a time as was the case in the early 1980s with companies such as Prodigy, the Source, CompuServe, and America On-Line (AOL). The early information service providers were largely walled gardens. A CompuServe user could only access information on the CompuServe network. Eventually the Internet became the network of choice and services migrated to it. Standards such as HTTP for Web page delivery and SMTP for email became established and dominate the Internet today. Technically, this has made the Internet much easier to use. The services that have developed on this more rationalised and unified platform have also tended toward monolithic, centralised architectures, despite the Internet’s apparent fundamental lack of a hierarchy. As the Internet replaced the closed networks, the wider Web of HTTP pages, forums, mailing lists and other forms of Internet communication and community thrived. Perhaps they required slightly more technological savvy than the carefully designed experience of walled-garden ISPs such as AOL, but these fora and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) rooms still provided the discreet environments within which to role-play. An individual could hold dozens of login names to as many different communities. These various niches could be simply hobby sites and forums where a user would deploy their identity as model train enthusiast, musician, or pet owner. They could also be explicitly about role-play, continuing the tradition of MUDs and MOOs into the new millennium. Pseudo- and polynymity were still very much part of the Internet experience. Even into the early parts of the so-called Web 2.0 explosion of more interactive Websites which allowed for easier dialog between site owner and viewer, a given identity would be very much tied to a single site, blog or even individual comments. There was no “single sign on” to link my thread from a music forum to the comments I made on a videogame blog to my aquarium photos at an image gallery site. Today, Facebook and Google, among others, seek to change all that. The Facebook Effect Working from a psychological background Turkle explored the multiplicity of online identities as a valuable learning, even therapeutic, experience. She assessed the experiences of individuals who were coming to terms with aspects of their own personalities, from simple shyness to exploring their sexuality. In “You Can’t Front on Facebook,” Mimi Marinucci summarizes an analysis of online behaviour by another psychologist, John Suler (67–70). Suler observed an “online disinhibition effect” characterised by users’ tendency to express themselves more openly online than offline (321). Awareness of this effect was drawn (no pun intended) into popular culture by cartoonist Mike Krahulik’s protagonist John Gabriel. Although Krahulik’s summation is straight to the point, Suler offers a more considered explanation. There are six general reasons for the online disinhibition effect: being anonymous, being invisible, the communications being out of sync, the strange sensation that a virtual interlocutor is all in the mind of the user, the general sense that the online world simply is not real and the minimisation of status and authority (321–325). Of the six, the notion of anonymity is most problematic, as briefly explored above in the case of AOL. The role of pseudonymity has been explored in more detail in Ruch, and will be considered with regard to Facebook and Google+ below. The Facebook effect, Marinucci argues, mitigates all six of these issues. Though Marinucci explains the mitigation of each factor individually, her final conclusion is the most compelling reason: “Facebook often facilitates what is best described as an integration of identities, and this integration of identities in turn functions as something of an inhibiting factor” (73). Ruch identifies this phenomenon as the “aggregation of identities” (219). Similarly, Brady Robards observes that “social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook collapse the entire array of social relationships into just one category, that of ‘Friend’” (20). Unlike earlier community sites, Ruch notes “Facebook rejects both the mythical anonymity of the Internet, but also the actual pseudo- or polynonymous potential of the technologies” (219). Essentially, Facebook works to bring the offline social world online, along with all the conventional baggage that accompanies the individual’s real-world social life. Facebook, and now Google+, present a hard, dichotomous approach to online identity: anonymous and authentic. Their socially networked individual is the “real” one, using a person’s given name, and bringing all (or as many as the sites can capture) their contacts from the offline world into the online one, regardless of context. The Facebook experience is one of “friending” everyone one has any social contact with into one hom*ogeneous group. Not only is Facebook avoiding the multiple online identities that interested Turkle, but it is disregarding any multiplicity of identity anywhere, including any online/offline split. David Kirkpatrick reports Mark Zuckerberg’s rejection of this construction of identity is explained by his belief that “You have one identity … having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” (199). Arguably, Zuckerberg’s calls for accountability through identity continue a perennial concern for anonymity online fuelled by “on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog” style moral panics. Over two decades ago Lindsy Van Gelder recounted the now infamous case of “Joan and Alex” (533) and Julian Dibbell recounted “a rape in cyberspace” (11). More recent anxieties concern the hacking escapades of Anonymous and LulzSec. Zuckerberg’s approach has been criticised by Christopher Poole, the founder of 4Chan—a bastion of Internet anonymity. During his keynote presentation at South by SouthWest 2011 Poole argued that Zuckerberg “equates anonymity with a lack of authenticity, almost a cowardice.” Yet in spite of these objections, Facebook has mainstream appeal. From a social constructivist perspective, this approach to identity would be satisfying the (perceived?) need for a mainstream, context-free, general social space online to cater for the hundreds of millions of people who now use the Internet. There is no specific, pre-defined reason to join Facebook in the way there is a particular reason to join a heavy metal music message board. Facebook is catering to the need to bring “real” social life online generally, with “real” in this case meaning “offline and pre-existing.” Very real risks of missing “real life” social events (engagements, new babies, party invitations etc) that were shared primarily via Facebook became salient to large groups of individuals not consciously concerned with some particular facet of identity performance. The commercial imperatives towards monolithic Internet and identity are obvious. Given that both Facebook and Google+ are in the business of facilitating the sale of advertising, their core business value is the demographic information they can sell to various companies for target advertising. Knowing a user’s individual identity and tastes is extremely important to those in the business of selling consumers what they currently want as well as predicting their future desires. The problem with this is the dawning realisation that even for the average person, role-playing is part of everyday life. We simply aren’t the same person in all contexts. None of the roles we play need to be particularly scandalous for this to be true, but we have different comfort zones with people that are fuelled by context. Suler proposes and Marinucci confirms that inhibition may be just as much part of our authentic self as the uninhibited expression experienced in more anonymous circ*mstances. Further, different contexts will inform what we inhibit and what we express. It is not as though there is a simple binary between two different groups and two different personal characteristics to oscillate between. The inhibited personnae one occupies at one’s grandmother’s home is a different inhibited self one plays at a job interview or in a heated discussion with faculty members at a university. One is politeness, the second professionalism, the third scholarly—yet they all restrain the individual in different ways. The Importance of Control over Circles Google+ is Google’s latest foray into the social networking arena. Its previous ventures Orkut and Google Buzz did not fare well, both were variously marred by legal issues concerning privacy, security, SPAM and hate groups. Buzz in particular fell afoul of associating Google accounts with users” real life identities, and (as noted earlier), all the baggage that comes with it. “One user blogged about how Buzz automatically added her abusive ex-boyfriend as a follower and exposed her communications with a current partner to him. Other bloggers commented that repressive governments in countries such as China or Iran could use Buzz to expose dissidents” (Novak). Google+ takes a different approach to its predecessors and its main rival, Facebook. Facebook allows for the organisation of “friends” into lists. Individuals can span more than one list. This is an exercise analogous to what Erving Goffman refers to as “audience segregation” (139). According to the site’s own statistics the average Facebook user has 130 friends, we anticipate it would be time-consuming to organise one’s friends according to real life social contexts. Yet without such organisation, Facebook overlooks the social structures and concomitant behaviours inherent in everyday life. Even broad groups offer little assistance. For example, an academic’s “Work People” list may include the Head of Department as well as numerous other lecturers with whom a workspace is shared. There are things one might share with immediate colleagues that should not be shared with the Head of Department. As Goffman states, “when audience segregation fails and an outsider happens upon a performance that was not meant for him, difficult problems in impression management arise” (139). By hom*ogenising “friends” and social contexts users are either inhibited or run the risk of some future awkward encounters. Google+ utilises “circles” as its method for organising contacts. The graphical user interface is intuitive, facilitated by an easy drag and drop function. Use of “circles” already exists in the vocabulary used to describe our social structures. “List” by contrast reduces the subject matter to simple data. The utility of Facebook’s friends lists is hindered by usability issues—an unintuitive and convoluted process that was added to Facebook well after its launch, perhaps a reaction to privacy concerns rather than a genuine attempt to emulate social organisation. For a cogent breakdown of these technical and design problems see Augusto Sellhorn. Organising friends into lists is a function offered by Facebook, but Google+ takes a different approach: organising friends in circles is a central feature; the whole experience is centred around attempting to mirror the social relations of real life. Google’s promotional video explains the centrality of emulating “real life relationships” (Google). Effectively, Facebook and Google+ have adopted two different systemic approaches to dealing with the same issue. Facebook places the burden of organising a hom*ogeneous mass of “friends” into lists on the user as an afterthought of connecting with another user. In contrast, Google+ builds organisation into the act of connecting. Whilst Google+’s approach is more intuitive and designed to facilitate social networking that more accurately reflects how real life social relationships are structured, it suffers from forcing direct correlation between an account and the account holder. That is, use of Google+ mandates bringing online the offline. Google+ operates a real names policy and on the weekend of 23 July 2011 suspended a number of accounts for violation of Google’s Community Standards. A suspension notice posted by Violet Blue reads: “After reviewing your profile, we determined the name you provided violates our Community Standards.” Open Source technologist Kirrily Robert polled 119 Google+ users about their experiences with the real names policy. The results posted to her on blog reveal that users desire pseudonymity, many for reasons of privacy and/or safety rather than the lack of integrity thought by Zuckerberg. boyd argues that Google’s real names policy is an abuse of power and poses danger to those users employing “nicks” for reasons including being a government employment or the victim of stalking, rape or domestic abuse. A comprehensive list of those at risk has been posted to the Geek Feminism Wiki (ironically, the Wiki utilises “Connect”, Facebook’s attempt at a single sign on solution for the Web that connects users’ movements with their Facebook profile). Facebook has a culture of real names stemming from its early adopters drawn from trusted communities, and this culture became a norm for that service (boyd). But as boyd also points out, “[r]eal names are by no means universal on Facebook.” Google+ demands real names, a demand justified by rhetoric of designing a social networking system that is more like real life. “Real”, in this case, is represented by one’s given name—irrespective of the authenticity of one’s pseudonym or the complications and dangers of using one’s given name. Conclusion There is a multiplicity of issues concerning social networks and identities, privacy and safety. This paper has outlined the challenges involved in moving real life to the online environment and the contests in trying to designate zones of social context. Where some earlier research into the social Internet has had a positive (even utopian) feel, the contemporary Internet is increasingly influenced by powerful and competing corporations. As a result, the experience of the Internet is not necessarily as flexible as Turkle or Rheingold might have envisioned. Rather than conducting identity experimentation or exercising multiple personnae, we are increasingly obligated to perform identity as it is defined by the monolithic service providers such as Facebook and Google+. This is not purely an indictment of Facebook or Google’s corporate drive, though they are obviously implicated, but has as much to do with the new social practice of “being online.” So, while there are myriad benefits to participating in this new social context, as Poole noted, the “cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself.” Areas for further exploration include the implications of Facebook positioning itself as a general-purpose user authentication tool whereby users can log into a wide array of Websites using their Facebook credentials. If Google were to take a similar action the implications would be even more convoluted, given the range of other services Google offers, from GMail to the Google Checkout payment service. While the monolithic centralisation of these services will have obvious benefits, there will be many more subtle problems which must be addressed. References Blue, Violet. “Google Plus Deleting Accounts en Masse: No Clear Answers.” zdnet.com (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/google-plus-deleting-accounts-en-masse-no-clear-answers/56›. boyd, danah. “Real Names Policies Are an Abuse of Power.” zephoria.org (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/04/real-names.html›. Cashmore, Pete. “MySpace Hits 100 Million Accounts.” mashable.com (2006). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://mashable.com/2006/08/09/myspace-hits-100-million-accounts›. Dibble, Julian. My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1998. Facebook. “Fact Sheet.” Facebook (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistic›. Geek Feminism Wiki. “Who Is Harmed by a Real Names Policy?” 2011. 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy› Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Google. “The Google+ Project: Explore Circles.” Youtube.com (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocPeAdpe_A8›. Kirkpatrick, David. The Facebook Effect. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Marinucci, Mimi. “You Can’t Front on Facebook.” Facebook and Philosophy. Ed. Dylan Wittkower. Chicago & La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2010. 65–74. Novak, Peter. “Privacy Commissioner Reviewing Google Buzz.” CBC News: Technology and Science (2010). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2010/02/16/google-buzz-privacy.html›. Poole, Christopher. Keynote presentation. South by SouthWest. Texas, Austin, 2011. Robards, Brady. “Negotiating Identity and Integrity on Social Network Sites for Educators.” International Journal for Educational Integrity 6.2 (2010): 19–23. Robert, Kirrily. “Preliminary Results of My Survey of Suspended Google Accounts.” 2011. 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://infotrope.net/2011/07/25/preliminary-results-of-my-survey-of-suspended-google-accounts/›. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Ruch, Adam. “The Decline of Pseudonymity.” Posthumanity. Eds. Adam Ruch and Ewan Kirkland. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary.net Press, 2010: 211–220. Sellhorn, Augusto. “Facebook Friend Lists Suck When Compared to Google+ Circles.” sellmic.com (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://sellmic.com/blog/2011/07/01/facebook-friend-lists-suck-when-compared-to-googleplus-circles›. Suler, John. “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” CyberPsychology and Behavior 7 (2004): 321–326. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Van Gelder, Lindsy. “The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover.” Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices Ed. Rob Kling. New York: Academic Press, 1996: 533–46.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Abstract:

IntroductionFor over five years, Romanians have been using their bodies in public spaces to challenge politicians’ disregard for the average citizen. In a region low in standards of civic engagement, such as voter turnout and petition signing, Romanian people’s “citizenship of the streets” has stopped environmentally destructive mining in 2013, ousted a corrupt cabinet in 2015, and blocked legislation legalising abuse of public office in 2017 (Solnit 214). This article explores the democratic affordances of collective resistive walking, by focusing on Romania’s capital, Bucharest. I illustrate how walking in protest of political corruption cultivates a democratic public and reconfigures city spaces as spaces of democratic engagement, in the context of increased illiberalism in the region. I examine two sites of protest: the Parliament Palace and Victoriei Square. The former is a construction emblematic of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and symbol of an authoritarian regime, whose surrounding area protestors reclaim as a civic space. The latter—a central part of the city bustling with the life of cafes, museums, bike lanes, and nearby parks—hosts the Government and has become an iconic site for pro-democratic movements. Spaces of Democracy: The Performativity of Public Assemblies Democracies are active achievements, dependent not only on the solidity of institutions —e.g., a free press and a constitution—but on people’s ability and desire to communicate about issues of concern and to occupy public space. Communicative approaches to democratic theory, formulated as inquiries into the public sphere and the plurality and evolution of publics, often return to establish the significance of public spaces and of bodies in the maintenance of our “rhetorical democracies” (Hauser). Speech and assembly, voice and space are sides of the same coin. In John Dewey’s work, communication is the main “loyalty” of democracy: the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in the uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (Dewey qtd. in Asen 197, emphasis added) Dewey asserts the centrality of communication in the same breath that he affirms the spatial infrastructure supporting it.Historically, Richard Sennett explains, Athenian democracy has been organised around two “spaces of democracy” where people assembled: the agora or town square and the theatre or Pnyx. While the theatre has endured as the symbol of democratic communication, with its ideal of concentrated attention on the argument of one speaker, Sennett illuminates the square as an equally important space, one without which deliberation in the Pnyx would be impossible. In the agora, citizens cultivate an ability to see, expect, and think through difference. In its open architecture and inclusiveness, Sennett explains, the agora affords the walker and dweller a public space to experience, in a quick, fragmentary, and embodied way, the differences and divergences in fellow citizens. Through visual scrutiny and embodied exposure, the square thus cultivates “an outlook favorable to discussion of differing views and conflicting interests”, useful for deliberation in the Pnyx, and the capacity to recognise strangers as part of the imagined democratic community (19). Also stressing the importance of spaces for assembly, Jürgen Habermas’s historical theorisation of the bourgeois public sphere moves the functions of the agora to the modern “third places” (Oldenburg) of the civic society emerging in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe: coffee houses, salons, and clubs. While Habermas’ conceptualization of a unified bourgeois public has been criticised for its class and gender exclusivism, and for its normative model of deliberation and consensus, such criticism has also opened paths of inquiry into the rhetorical pluralism of publics and into the democratic affordances of embodied performativity. Thus, unlike Habermas’s assumption of a single bourgeois public, work on twentieth and twenty-first century publics has attended to their wide variety in post-modern societies (e.g., Bruce; Butler; Delicath and DeLuca; Fraser; Harold and DeLuca; Hauser; Lewis; Mckinnon et al.; Pezzullo; Rai; Tabako). In contrast to the Habermasian close attention to verbal argumentation, such criticism prioritizes the embodied (performative, aesthetic, and material) ways in which publics manifest their attention to common issues. From suffragists to environmentalists and, most recently, anti-precarity movements across the globe, publics assemble and move through shared space, seeking to break hegemonies of media representation by creating media events of their own. In the process, Judith Butler explains, such embodied assemblies accomplish much more. They disrupt prevalent logics and dominant feelings of disposability, precarity, and anxiety, at the same time that they (re)constitute subjects and increasingly privatised spaces into citizens and public places of democracy, respectively. Butler proposes that to best understand recent protests we need to read collective assembly in the current political moment of “accelerating precarity” and responsibilisation (10). Globally, increasingly larger populations are exposed to economic insecurity and precarity through government withdrawal from labor protections and the diminishment of social services, to the profit of increasingly monopolistic business. A logic of self-investment and personal responsibility accompanies such structural changes, as people understand themselves as individual market actors in competition with other market actors rather than as citizens and community members (Brown). In this context, public assembly would enact an alternative, insisting on interdependency. Bodies, in such assemblies, signify both symbolically (their will to speak against power) and indexically. As Butler describes, “it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt” (10). Butler describes the function of these protests more fully:[P]lural enactments […] make manifest the understanding that a situation is shared, contesting the individualizing morality that makes a moral norm of economic self-sufficiency precisely […] when self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly unrealizable. Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech, and silence are all aspects of a sudden assembly, an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics […] [T]he bodies assembled ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently. (18)Though Romania is not included in her account of contemporary protest movements, Butler’s theoretical account aptly describes both the structural and ideological conditions, and the performativity of Romanian protestors. In Romania, citizens have started to assemble in the streets against austerity measures (2012), environmental destruction (2013), fatal infrastructures (2015) and against the government’s corruption and attempts to undermine the Judiciary (from February 2017 onward). While, as scholars have argued (Olteanu and Beyerle; Gubernat and Rammelt), political corruption has gradually crystallised into the dominant and enduring framework for the assembled publics, post-communist corruption has been part and parcel of the neoliberalisation of Central and Eastern-European societies after the fall of communism. In the region, Leslie Holmes explains, former communist elites or the nomenklatura, have remained the majority political class after 1989. With political power and under the shelter of political immunity, nomenklatura politicians “were able to take ethically questionable advantage in various ways […] of the sell-off of previously state-owned enterprises” (Holmes 12). The process through which the established political class became owners of a previously state-owned economy is known as “nomenklatura privatization”, a common form of political corruption in the region, Holmes explains (12). Such practices were common knowledge among a cynical population through most of the 1990s and the 2000s. They were not broadly challenged in an ideological milieu attached, as Mihaela Miroiu, Isabela Preoteasa, and Jerzy Szacki argued, to extreme forms of liberalism and neoliberalism, ideologies perceived by people just coming out of communism as anti-ideology. Almost three decades since the fall of communism, in the face of unyielding levels of poverty (Zaharia; Marin), the decaying state of healthcare and education (Bilefsky; “Education”), and migration rates second only to war-torn Syria (Deletant), Romanian protestors have come to attribute the diminution of life in post-communism to the political corruption of the established political class (“Romania Corruption Report”; “Corruption Perceptions”). Following systematic attempts by the nomenklatura-heavy governing coalition to undermine the judiciary and institutionalise de facto corruption of public officials (Deletant), protestors have been returning to public spaces on a weekly basis, de-normalising the political cynicism and isolation serving the established political class. Mothers Walking: Resignifying Communist Spaces, Imagining the New DemosOn 11 July 2018, a protest of mothers was streamed live by Corruption Kills (Corupția ucide), a Facebook group started by activist Florin Bădiță after a deadly nightclub fire attributed to the corruption of public servants, in 2015 (Commander). Organized protests at the time pressured the Social-Democratic cabinet into resignation. Corruption Kills has remained a key activist platform, organising assemblies, streaming live from demonstrations, and sharing personal acts of dissent, thus extending the life of embodied assemblies. In the mothers’ protest video, women carrying babies in body-wraps and strollers walk across the intersection leading to the Parliament Palace, while police direct traffic and ensure their safety (“Civil Disobedience”). This was an unusual scene for many reasons. Walkers met at the entrance to the Parliament Palace, an area most emblematic of the former regime. Built by Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu and inspired by Kim Il-sung’s North Korean architecture, the current Parliament building and its surrounding plaza remain, in the words of Renata Salecl, “one of the most traumatic remnants of the communist regime” (90). The construction is the second largest administrative building in the world, after the Pentagon, a size matching the ambitions of the dictator. It bears witness to the personal and cultural sacrifices the construction and its surrounded plaza required: the displacement of some 40,000 people from old neighbourhood Uranus, the death of reportedly thousands of workers, and the flattening of churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools (Parliament Palace). This arbitrary construction carved out of the old city remains a symbol of an authoritarian relation with the nation. As Salecl puts it, Ceaușescu’s project tried to realise the utopia of a new communist “centre” and created an artificial space as removed from the rest of the city as the leader himself was from the needs of his people. Twenty-nine years after the fall of communism, the plaza of the Parliament Palace remains as suspended from the life of the city as it was during the 1980s. The trees lining the boulevard have grown slightly and bike lanes are painted over decaying stones. Still, only few people walk by the neo-classical apartment buildings now discoloured and stained by weather and time. Salecl remarks on the panoptic experience of the Parliament Palace: “observed from the avenue, [the palace] appears to have no entrance; there are only numerous windows, which give the impression of an omnipresent gaze” (95). The building embodies, for Salecl, the logic of surveillance of the communist regime, which “created the impression of omnipresence” through a secret police that rallied members among regular citizens and inspired fear by striking randomly (95).Against this geography steeped in collective memories of fear and exposure to the gaze of the state, women turn their children’s bodies and their own into performances of resistance that draw on the rhetorical force of communist gender politics. Both motherhood and childhood were heavily regulated roles under Ceaușescu’s nationalist-socialist politics of forced birth, despite the official idealisation of both. Producing children for the nationalist-communist state was women’s mandated expression of citizenship. Declaring the foetus “the socialist property of the whole society”, in 1966 Ceaușescu criminalised abortion for women of reproductive ages who had fewer than four children, and, starting 1985, less than five children (Ceaușescu qtd. in Verdery). What followed was “a national tragedy”: illegal abortions became the leading cause of death for fertile women, children were abandoned into inhumane conditions in the infamous orphanages, and mothers experienced the everyday drama of caring for families in an economy of shortages (Kligman 364). The communist politicisation of natality during communist Romania exemplifies one of the worst manifestations of the political as biopolitical. The current maternal bodies and children’s bodies circulating in the communist-iconic plaza articulate past and present for Romanians, redeploying a traumatic collective memory to challenge increasingly authoritarian ambitions of the governing Social Democratic Party. The images of caring mothers walking in protest with their babies furthers the claims that anti-corruption publics have made in other venues: that the government, in their indifference and corruption, is driving millions of people, usually young, out of the country, in a braindrain of unprecedented proportions (Ursu; Deletant; #vavedemdinSibiu). In their determination to walk during the gruelling temperatures of mid-July, in their youth and their babies’ youth, the mothers’ walk performs the contrast between their generation of engaged, persistent, and caring citizens and the docile abused subject of a past indexed by the Ceaușescu-era architecture. In addition to performing a new caring imagined community (Anderson), women’s silent, resolute walk on the crosswalk turns a lifeless geography, heavy with the architectural traces of authoritarian history, into a public space that holds democratic protest. By inhabiting the cultural role of mothers, protestors disarmed state authorities: instead of the militarised gendarmerie usually policing protestors the Victoriei Square, only traffic police were called for the mothers’ protest. The police choreographed cars and people, as protestors walked across the intersection leading to the Parliament. Drivers, usually aggressive and insouciant, now moved in concert with the protestors. The mothers’ walk, immediately modeled by people in other cities (Cluj-Napoca), reconfigured a car-dominated geography and an unreliable, driver-friendly police, into a civic space that is struggling to facilitate the citizens’ peaceful disobedience. The walkers’ assembly thus begins to constitute the civic character of the plaza, collecting “the space itself […] the pavement and […] the architecture [to produce] the public character of that material environment” (Butler 71). It demonstrates the possibility of a new imagined community of caring and persistent citizens, one significantly different from the cynical, disconnected, and survivalist subjects that the nomenklatura politicians, nested in the Panoptic Parliament nearby, would prefer.Persisting in the Victoriei Square In addition to strenuous physical walking to reclaim city spaces, such as the mothers’ walking, the anti-corruption public also practices walking and gathering in less taxing environments. The Victoriei Square is such a place, a central plaza that connects major boulevards with large sidewalks, functional bike lanes, and old trees. The square is the architectural meeting point of old and new, where communist apartments meet late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, in a privileged neighbourhood of villas, museums, and foreign consulates. One of these 1930s constructions is the Government building, hosting the Prime Minister’s cabinet. Demonstrators gathered here during the major protests of 2015 and 2017, and have walked, stood, and wandered in the square almost weekly since (“Past Events”). On 24 June 2018, I arrive in the Victoriei Square to participate in the protest announced on social media by Corruption Kills. There is room to move, to pause, and rest. In some pockets, people assemble to pay attention to impromptu speakers who come onto a small platform to share their ideas. Occasionally someone starts chanting “We See You!” and “Down with Corruption!” and almost everyone joins the chant. A few young people circulate petitions. But there is little exultation in the group as a whole, shared mostly among those taking up the stage or waving flags. Throughout the square, groups of familiars stop to chat. Couples and families walk their bikes, strolling slowly through the crowds, seemingly heading to or coming from the nearby park on a summer evening. Small kids play together, drawing with chalk on the pavement, or greeting dogs while parents greet each other. Older children race one another, picking up on the sense of freedom and de-centred but still purposeful engagement. The openness of the space allows one to meander and observe all these groups, performing the function of the Ancient agora: making visible the strangers who are part of the polis. The overwhelming feeling is one of solidarity. This comes partly from the possibilities of collective agency and the feeling of comfortably taking up space and having your embodiment respected, otherwise hard to come by in other spaces of the city. Everyday walking in the streets of Romanian cities is usually an exercise in hypervigilant physical prowess and self-preserving numbness. You keep your eyes on the ground to not stumble on broken pavement. You watch ahead for unmarked construction work. You live with other people’s sweat on the hot buses. You hop among cars parked on sidewalks and listen keenly for when others may zoom by. In one of the last post-socialist states to join the European Union, living with generalised poverty means walking in cities where your senses must be dulled to manage the heat, the dust, the smells, and the waiting, irresponsive to beauty and to amiable sociality. The euphemistic vocabulary of neoliberalism may describe everyday walking through individualistic terms such as “grit” or “resilience.” And while people are called to effort, creativity, and endurance not needed in more functional states, what one experiences is the gradual diminution of one’s lives under a political regime where illiberalism keeps a citizen-serving democracy at bay. By contrast, the Victoriei Square holds bodies whose comfort in each other’s presence allow us to imagine a political community where survivalism, or what Lauren Berlant calls “lateral agency”, are no longer the norm. In “showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still […] an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics” is enacted (Butler 18). In arriving to Victoriei Square repeatedly, Romanians demonstrate that there is room to breathe more easily, to engage with civility, and to trust the strangers in their country. They assert that they are not disposable, even if a neoliberal corrupt post-communist regime would have them otherwise.ConclusionBecoming a public, as Michael Warner proposes, is an ongoing process of attention to an issue, through the circulation of discourse and self-organisation with strangers. For the anti-corruption public of Romania’s past years, such ongoing work is accompanied by persistent, civil, embodied collective assembly, in an articulation of claims, bodies, and spaces that promotes a material agency that reconfigures the city and the imagined Romanian community into a more democratic one. The Romanian citizenship of the streets is particularly significant in the current geopolitical and ideological moment. In the region, increasing authoritarianism meets the alienating logics of neoliberalism, both trying to reduce citizens to disposable, self-reliant, and disconnected market actors. Populist autocrats—Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, the Peace and Justice Party in Poland, and recently E.U.-penalized Victor Orban, in Hungary—are dismantling the system of checks and balances, and posing threats to a European Union already challenged by refugee debates and Donald Trump’s unreliable alliance against authoritarianism. In such a moment, the Romanian anti-corruption public performs within the geographies of their city solidarity and commitment to democracy, demonstrating an alternative to the submissive and disconnected subjects preferred by authoritarianism and neoliberalism.Author's NoteIn addition to the anonymous reviewers, the author would like to thank Mary Tuominen and Jesse Schlotterbeck for their helpful comments on this essay.ReferencesAnderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016.Asen, Robert. “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189-211. Berlant, Lauren. “Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33.4 (2007): 754-80. Bilefsky, Dan. “Medical Care in Romania Comes at an Extra Cost.” New York Times, 8 Mar. 2009. 1 Sep. 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/world/europe/09bribery.html>.Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalism Poisons Everything: How Free Market Mania Threatens Education — and Democracy.” Interview by Elias Isquith. Salon, 15 June 2015. 20 May 2016 <https://www.salon.com/2015/06/15/democracy_cannot_survive_why_the_neoliberal_revolution_has_freedom_on_the_ropes/>.Bruce, Caitlin. “The Balaclava as Affect Generator: Free puss* Riot Protests and Transnational Iconicity.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12.1 (2015): 42-62. Butler, Judith. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015.Calhoun, Craig J. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992. Cisneros, Josue David. “(Re)bordering the Civic Imaginary: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97.1 (2011): 26-49. “Civil Disobedience, Corruption Kills.” Facebook, 11 July 2018. 12 July 2018 <https://www.facebook.com/coruptia.ucide/videos/852289114959995/>. “Cluj-Napoca. Civil Disobedience.” Corruption Kills. 9 Sep. 2018 <https://www.facebook.com/coruptia.ucide/videos/847309685457938/>.Commander, Emily. “European Personality of the Year: Florin Badita, Founder of Corruption Kills.” Euronews, 31 May 2018. 12 Sep. 2018 <http://www.euronews.com/2018/05/31/european-personality-of-the-year-florin-badita-founder-of-corruption-kills>.“Corruption Perceptions Index 2017.” Transparency International, 21 Feb. 2018. 20 July 2018 <https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2017>. Deletant, Dennis. “Romania’s Protests and the PSD: Understanding the Deep Malaise That Now Exists in Romanian Society.” London School of Economics and Political Science, 31 Aug. 2018. 10 Sep. 2018 <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2018/08/31/romanias-protests-and-the-psd-understanding-the-deep-malaise-that-now-exists-in-romanian-society/>. Delicath, John W., and Kevin Michael DeLuca. “Image Events, the Public Sphere, and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical Environmental Groups.” Argumentation 17 (2003): 315-33. Dewey, John. “Creative Democracy—the Task before Us.” The Later Works, 1925–1953. Volume 14: 1939–1941. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 227. “Education and Training Monitor 2017 Romania.” European Commission. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2017. 8 Sep. 2018 <https://ec.europa.eu/education/sites/education/files/monitor2017-ro_en.pdf>.Fabj, Valeria. “Motherhood as Political Voice: The Rhetoric of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.” Communication Studies 44.1 (1993): 1-18. Foss, Karen A., and Kathy L. Domenici. “Haunting Argentina: Synecdoche in the Protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87.3 (2001): 237-58. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. 109-42.Gubernat, Ruxandra, and Henry P. Rammelt. “Recreative Activism in Romania How Cultural Affiliation and Lifestyle Yield Political Engagement.” Socio.hu (2017): 143–63. 20 June 2018 <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01689629/document>.Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. 1962. Trans. T. Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1989.Harold, Christine, and Kevin Michael DeLuca. “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8.2 (2005): 263-86. Hauser, Gerard A. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia: U of South Carolina, 1999. Holmes, Leslie. Corruption: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Kligman, Gail. “The Politics of Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania: A Case Study in Political Culture.” East European Politics and Societies 6.3 (1992): 364–418. Lewis, Tiffany. “The Mountaineering and Wilderness Rhetorics of Washington Woman Suffragists.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 21. 2 (2018): 279 -315.Marin, Iulia. “Survival Strategies for Middle-Class Romanians.” PressOne, 28 Nov. 2016. 24 July 2018 <https://pressone.ro/strategii-de-supravietuire-in-clasa-de-mijloc-a-romaniei/>. McKinnon, Sara L., Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard. Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2016. Miroiu, Mihaela. Societatea Retro. București: Editura Trei, 1999.Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999.Olteanu, Tina, and Shaazka Beyerle. “The Romanian People versus Corruption: A Paradoxical Nexus of Protest and Adaptation.” Partecipazione e Conflitto 10.3 (2017): 797-825. 20 June 2018 <http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/paco/article/view/18551>.Parliament Palace Visitor Tour. Communication during group tour on 20 June 2018. “Past Events: Coruptia Ucide.” Facebook, n.d. 9 Aug. 2018 <https://www.facebook.com/pg/coruptia.ucide/events/?ref=page_internal>. Pezzullo, Phaedra C. “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89.4 (2003): 345-65. Preoteasa, Isabela. “Intellectuals and the Public Sphere in Post-Communist Romania: A Discourse Analytical Perspective.” Discourse & Society 13 (2002): 269-292. Rai, Candice. Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2016.“Romania Corruption Report.” GAN Business Anticorruption Portal, Apr. 2017. 9 Sep. 2018 <https://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/romania/>.Salecl, Renata. (Per)versions of Love and Hate. London: Verso, 2000.Sennett, Richard. The Spaces of Democracy. Ann Arbor: Goetzcraft Printers, 1998. <https://taubmancollege.umich.edu/pdfs/publications/map/wallenberg1998_richardsennett.pdf>. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Granta, 2014.Szacki, Jerzy. 1995. Liberalism after Communism. Budapest: Central European UP. Tabako, Tomasz. “Irony as a Pro-Democracy Trope: Europe’s Last Comic Revolution.” Controversia 5.2 (2007): 23-53. Ursu, Ramona. Va Vedem (We See You). Bucharest: Humanitas, 2018.“#vavedemdinSibiu. Aproape 700 de sibieni, cu bagajele în fața sediului PSD.” Turnul Sfatului, 17 Dec. 2017. 10 Sep. 2018 <http://www.turnulsfatului.ro/2017/12/17/foto-protestele-vavedemdinsibiu-aproape-700-de-sibieni-cu-bagajele-fata-sediului-psd/>.Verdery, Katherine. “From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe.” East European Politics and Societies 8.2 (1994): 225–255. Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics (Abbreviated Version).” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88.4 (2002): 413–25. Zaharia, Diana. “Poverty in Statistics.” Profit.ro. 8 Aug. 2016. 1 Sep. 2018 <https://www.profit.ro/stiri/economie/saracia-din-statistici-aproape-jumatate-dintre-salariatii-romani-raman-cu-cel-mult-1-000-lei-in-mana-dupa-taxare-15540558>.