Unlike Us - Understanding Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives
Date: March 8-10, 2012
Location: TrouwAmsterdam, Wibautstraat 127, 1091 GL Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Thursday, March 8
13.00 – 16.30 > PROJECT SESSION >
Showcasing Alternatives in Social Media
The best way to criticize platform monopolies is to support
alternative free and open source software that can be locally installed.
There are currently a multitude of decentralized social networks in the
making that aspire to facilitate users with greater power to define for
themselves with whom share their data. Let us look into the wildly
different initiatives from Secushare Carlo v. Loesch/lynX (DE), Briar Michael Rogers (GB), Crabgrass Elijah Sparrow (USA) and Freedombox James Vasile (USA), Lorea Spideralex (ES).
Conference day 1: Friday, March 9
10.00 – 12.30 > SESSION 1 >
Social what? Defining the social
Moderator: Geert Lovink (NL)
Speakers:
Jodi Dean (USA)
Society doesn’t exist
Over the last several decades, it has become common to the point of
banal to say that “society doesn’t exist.” In Margaret Thatcher’s
neoliberal policies, the radical democracy of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe, the actor network theory of Bruno Latour, and the
anarcho-communism of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri the meme of
society’s non-existence reappears. At the same time, for about a decade
now, we’ve been barraged social media spam. In my presentation, I will
consider the conjuncture of the claim that society
doesn’t exist with that for social media. Is the problem here that
social media publicists simply didn’t get the memo regarding society’s
non-existence? Or does social media bring (back) into existence what had
been said to be an absent fantasy? In other words, does social media
restore the missing social or is it a symptom of it? I will argue that
it’s a symptom, one that displace attention from the real of political
antagonism.
Eva Illouz (IL)
What is Social in Social Media?
Dylan Wittkower (USA)
Reification 2.0
While The Social Network displayed, for the most part, the sort of understanding of Zuckerberg and Facebook better suited to Revenge of the Nerds V,
there is one crucial thing that the film presented which seems to be
literally false of Zuckerberg, but figuratively true of social network
users in the Facebook age: we are getting lost in the commodification of
our relationships. The use of “who you know” in business, and the
social climbing which mobilizes relationships towards commerce are
nothing new, of course, and neither are their youth equivalents, which
trade on the currency of ‘popularity’. And yet, with Facebook we see
those connections made ever more clearly into things to be possessed and
used—not only by the network’s commodification of our personal data,
but through users’ own mutual commodifications of one another: A
reification 2.0 to go along with web 2.0.
13.30 – 15.30 > SESSION 2 >
Artistic Responses to Social Media
Artists are playing a crucial role in visualizing power relationships
and disrupting subliminal daily routines of social media usage.
Artistic practice provides an important analytical site in the context
of the proposed research agenda, as artists are often first to
deconstruct the familiar and to facilitate an alternative lens to
understand and critique these media. Is there such a thing as a social
‘web aesthetics’? It is one thing to criticize Twitter and Facebook for
their primitive and bland interface designs. How can we imagine the
social in different ways? And how can we design and implement new
interfaces to provide more creative freedom to cater to our multiple
identities? Also, what is the scope of interventions with social media,
such as, for example, the ‘dislike button’ add-on for Facebook? And what
practices are really needed? Isn’t it time, for example, for a Facebook
‘identity correction’?
Moderator: Josephine Bosma (NL)
Speakers:
Thomas Cheneseau (FR)
FacebookFeedback
is an original visual expression which examines the limits of the
interface of this social network and deconstructs the temporal space of
the website. Facebook is diverted and used both as media and medium, as a
medium for dissemination and exposure, but mainly as a space of
creation and existence of an artwork. This artistic research consists of
a series of screenshots (pictures and videos) which appropriate plastic
material such as codes of Facebook, as well as a series of progressive
visual feedback, which makes possible towards the end to break down the
timeline imposed by the social network. Thomas also directed the project
HEKKAH, an interactive installation generated by the Facebook news feed in real time.
Walter Langelaar (NL)
Web 2.0 Suicide Machine
Alessandro Ludovico (IT)
Face to Facebook, smiling in the eternal party
Social networking is naturally addictive. It’s about exploring
something very familiar that has never been available before: staying in
touch with past and present friends and acquaintances in a single,
potentially infinite, virtual space. The phenomenon challenges us
psychologically, creating situations that previously were not possible.
Before the rise of social networking, former friends and acquaintances
would tend to drift away from us and potentially become consigned to our
personal histories. Having a virtual space with (re)active people
constantly updating their activities is the basic, powerful fascination
of the social network. But there’s another attraction, based on the
elusive sport to position ourselves. The answer to the fundamental
identity question, “who am I?” can be given only in relation to the
others that we interact with. And the answer to this question seems
clearer after we take a look at our list of social network friends.
15.45 – 17.30 > SESSION 3 >
The Private in the Public
The advent of social media has eroded privacy as we know it, giving
rise to a culture of self-surveillance made up of myriad voluntary,
everyday disclosures. New understandings of private and public are
needed to address this phenomenon. What does owning all this user data
actually mean? Why are people willing to give up their personal data,
and that of others? How should software platforms be regulated?
Moderator: Lonneke van der Velden (NL)
Speakers:
Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius (NL)
The Ecosystem of Online Audience Buying
Behavioural targeting is the monitoring of online behaviour of
internet users over time, in order to build a profile of these users, to
target them with advertising matching their inferred interests. Users
of social networking sites help marketing companies by profiling
themselves. Profiles can be further enriched with up to date location
data of users of mobile devices, and with other data that are gathered
on and off line. Providers of social networking sites use profiles to
provide advertisers with detailed audience segments to target with
advertising. Other companies enrich their consumer profiles by
extracting information from social network sites. A complex ecosystem of
companies emerges, in which collected data are combined, analysed, and
auctioned off in almost real time. The presentation gives an overview of
this ecosystem.
Seda Gürses (TR/BE)
Privacy in Online Social Networks: A requirements engineering perspective
Social networks have been at the front line of introducing new services
that raise privacy concerns previously unthought of. Not only have these
outcries shown that privacy is an ever changing and contextual notion,
they underline the variety of activities that can lead to privacy
concerns and the variety of tools needed to counter the raised issues.
Privacy itself is a debated notion with various definitions that are
also often vague. While this increases the resilience of the privacy
concept in social and legal contexts, it poses a considerable challenge
to defining the privacy problem and the “appropriate” solutions to
address those problems in a technical system-to-be. When engineering
systems, the stakeholders of the system ideally step through a process
of reconciling the relevant privacy definitions and the (technical)
privacy solutions in the given social context. During the talk, I will
discuss how this reconciliation can be approached during requirements
engineering using examples from the interdisciplinary project on
Security and Privacy in Online Social Networks (SPION).
Caroline Nevejan (NL)
Being and Bearing Witness in Communities of Systems and People
Next generation material and immaterial infrastructres are merging
networks for commodities like water and energy with social networks in
which human intentions and behavior are expressed. The design of such
networks needs a new design paradigm to which an individual human
being’s perspective is core. Human beings need to be able to accept
repsonsibility and liability in such a context. Responsibility and
liability, being witness and bearing witness, establishing trust and
truth are foundationall for social structures. What are parameters for
such a new design paradigm?
Arnold Roosendaal (NL)
Who decides who I am online?
You decide who you are online. Or do you? Via internet you send
information for education, work, recreation or shopping, stay in contact
with friends on social networking sites, etc. Next to information you
share deliberately, additional information about online behavior is
collected. With this information other parties create, build, trade and
use your online identities. Do we know and should we care? This
presentation and provides an insight in the way commercial companies
construct your online identity, and how individual autonomy is affected
by preset choices and inclusion or exclusion mechanisms. It also shows
how profiling is no longer group based, but strictly individualized,
with direct impact on each separate individual. Commercial companies
gain a central position on the internet, function as identity providers,
and therewith make individuals dependent on them. Escaping becomes more
and more difficult.
Conference day 2: Saturday, March 10
(9.30 Unlike Us org. meeting)
11.00 – 12.30 > SESSION 4 >
Software Matters
One of the important components of social media is software. For all
the discourse on sociopolitical power relations governed by corporations
such as Facebook and related platforms, one must not forget that social
media platforms are thoroughly defined and powered by software. We need
critical engagement with Facebook as software. That is, what is the
role of software in reconfiguring contemporary social spaces? In what
ways does code make a difference in how identities are formed and social
relationships performed? How does the software function to interpellate
users to its logic? What are the discourses surrounding software?
Moderator: Korinna Patelis
Speakers:
David M. Berry (UK)
Thinking Software: Realtime Streams and Knowledge in the Digital Age
As software/code increasingly structures the contemporary world,
curiously, it also withdraws, and becomes harder and harder for us to
focus on as it is embedded, hidden, off-shored or merely forgotten
about. The challenge is to bring software/code back into visibility so
that we can pay attention to both what it is (ontology/medium), where it
has come from (media archaeology/genealogy) but also what it is doing
(through a form of mechanology), so we can understand this ‘dynamic of
organized inorganic matter’. In this talk I want to present some of the
questions raised by thinking about software/code but also to explore
some of the implications of code/software for critically understanding
social media and more broadly for knowledge and the university itself.
Anne Helmond (NL) and Carolin Gerlitz (UK)
Reworking the fabric of the web: The Like economy
In recent years, Facebook has increasingly expanded beyond the limits
of its platform, first through social buttons and the Open Graph, and
more recently through new possibilities of app development, frictionless
sharing and differentiated Facebook actions. These digital devices
allow Facebook to turn user interactivity instantly into valuable data,
creating what we have described as a Like Economy. In this paper, we
explore how the platform produces a very particular fabric of the web
with its software design by focusing on social buttons, apps and
actions. The introduction of social buttons and social plug-ins allowed
for a partial opening of the platform as walled garden – carefully
regulated by its Graph API – and led to an increasing decentralisation
of the web. Yet, the new apps, sharing possibilities and actions
introduce a recentralisation as content and user activities are designed
to remain within the platform. By tracing the data- and content flows
enabled between the platform and the web, we suggest that the Like
Economy cuts across straightforward ideas of Facebook as a walled garden
but instead creates complex spatial relations, organised through a
number of new relationship markers beyond the hyperlink which create new
multi-layered dataflows.
Ganaele Langlois (CA)
Language, Subjectivation and Social Technologies
This presentation will engage with the works of Virno, Bifo,
Lazzarato and Guattari to understand how language can be used as a site
of analysis to understand the processes of subjectivation at stake in
the neoliberal, post-fordist context. The starting premise is that
capital, through new communication technologies, has invested heavily in
subjective areas of life such as sociality and affect, most visibly
through the development of online social networks and user-generated
content platforms. In contrast to industrial capitalism, which sought to
destroy the human psyche, the post-fordist context promotes the
integration of previously alienated and resistant dynamics of individual
and collective expressions of subjectivity. Language in particular
should now be studied as a site of expression of such processes of
subjectivation, and should therefore be understood as more than pure
linguistic signs uttered by human actors. Rather, language involves not
only social power relations, but also technolinguistic processes
(automated and personalized recommendations, ratings and rankings) that
create the dynamics through which subjectivities are encircled. In so
doing, a theoretical shift should be undertaken from a focus on the
content of communication to the semio-technical conditions that manage a
seeming plurality of exchange.
13.30 – 15.30 > SESSION 5 >
Pitfalls of Building Social Media Alternatives (Debate)
It is not only important to critique and question existing design and
socio-political realities but also to engage with possible futures. The
central aim of this project is therefore to contribute and support
‘alternatives in social media’. What would the collective design of
alternative protocols and interfaces look like? We should find some
comfort in the small explosion of alternative options currently
available, but also ask how usable these options are and how real is the
danger of fragmentation. How have developers from different initiatives
so far collaborated and what might we learn from their successes and
failures? Understanding any early failures and successes of these
attempts seems crucial. A related issue concerns funding difficulties
faced by projects. Finally, in what ways does regionalism (United
States, Europe, Asia) feed into the way people search for alternatives
and use social media.
Moderator: Caroline Nevejan (NL)
Speakers:
Carlo v. Loesch/lynX (DE) from Secushare
Most applications have become dependent on Internet servers with
serious man-in-the-middle privacy implications. You might expect in the
year 2012 we should have technology that allows us to deliver messages
or data between phones and computers in absolute safety, but this isn’t
the case. Exchanging keys is a hassle, protocols are inefficient and
side effects of encryption need to be considered. Secure Share intends
to provide a new communication paradigm for the Internet as it enables
applications to interact securely between the personal devices of people
while letting servers be of occasional help in an innocuous way. It
combines a flexible and efficient social communications protocol (PSYC2)
with an advanced encrypted routing technology (GNUnet). One such
application for this would be a social platform equivalent to
Faceboogle, but distributed and encrypted straight from your phone or
desktop. In this workshop we’ll try to get some undeniable privacy onto
our phones and laptops for a start.
Michael Rogers (UK) from Briar
Briar: A Secure News and Discussion System
The Briar project is building a news and discussion platform to
enable people in authoritarian countries to communicate without fear
of government surveillance or censorship. We’re developing software that
uses whatever media are available locally — from internet
connections to Bluetooth, WiFi and even USB sticks — to create
encrypted, delay-tolerant networks for distributing news, files and
conversations.
Elijah Sparrow (USA) from Crabgrass
Crabgrass – online social organizing and group collaboration
Crabgrass is a software libre web application designed for social
networking, group collaboration and network organizing. Our goal is to
create communication tools that are tailored specifically to meet
the needs of bottom up grassroots organizing. While social movements
have grown more adept at using the web to communicate publicly, we are
still mostly using inadequate tools to communicate amongst ourselves.
Most groups rely heavily on email, lists, and wikis–but these tools are
not suited for the complexity of relationships that activist
organizations face in the real world. The internet may herald a deep
change in democratic communication, but the internet is simultaneously
the most effective tool for mass surveillance ever devised. The goal of
Crabgrass is to become a secure alternative to surveillance-based online
tools
that most activists rely on today.
Spideralex (ES) from Lorea
Lorea is a seedbed of free social networks linked by federation
protocols that allow them to communicate. Lorea is not just software,
but also a technical and political tool for the federated web, bringing
back autonomy, freedom and total control over our data and our memory to
the hands of the users of social networking sites themselves. The
federation knocks down the walls of the panopticon 2.0 run by
corporations and political interests, and offers a non-profit
alternative to regain our technological sovereignty in the world of
social networks. The project is aimed at civil society as a whole, i.e.
Citizens and social collectives and political change organisations that
are motivated by the desire to interact, share, change things together,
devise solutions. We seek to address all people and groups who value
their online identities and ther security and privacy . We value the
right to freedom of expression, and the right to share information and
knowledge and do so within a free and neutral social web.
James Vasile (USA) from Freedombox
FreedomBox will put in people’s own hands and under their own control
encrypted voice and text communication, anonymous publishing, social
networking, media sharing, and (micro)blogging. FreedomBox integrates
privacy protection on a cheap plug server so everybody can have privacy.
Data stays in your home and can’t be mined by
governments, billionaires, thugs or even gossipy neighbors.
15.45 – 17.30 > SESSION 6 >
Social Media Activism and the Critique of Liberation Technology
While the tendency to label any emergent social movement as the
latest ‘Twitter revolution’ has passed, a liberal discourse of
‘liberation technology’ (information and communication technologies that
empower grassroots movements) continues to influence our ideas about
networked participation. This discourse tends to obscure power relations
and obstruct critical questioning about the capitalist institutions and
superstructures in which these technologies operate.
What are the assumptions behind this neo-liberal discourse? What role
do ‘developed’ nations play when they promote and subsidize the
development of technologies of circumvention and hacktivism for use in
‘underdeveloped’ states, while at the same time allowing social media
companies at home to operate in increasingly deregulated environments
and collaborating with them in the surveillance of citizens at home and
abroad? What role do companies play in determining how their products
are used by dissidents or governments abroad? How have their policies
and Terms of Use changed as a result?
Moderator: Oliver Leistert (HU)
Speakers:
Philipp Budka (AT)
Indigenous cyber activism: the case of K-Net and MyKnet.org in northwestern Ontario, Canada
In 1994 the Kuhkenah Network (K-Net, http://www.knet.ca/),
a tribal council initiative, started to connect people in the remote
region of northwestern Ontario, Canada, through digital communication
technologies. It started with a simple bulletin board system and now
includes the construction and support of a whole broadband internet
infrastructure. This infrastructure allowed for the creation of services
that have become widely popular among First Nation people, from
telemedicine and online learning to free webspace. One of those services
is MyKnet.org (http://myknet.org/)
which provides free personal homepages, particularly for the youth.
Those homepages can be understood as local representations of indigenous
cultures, lives and identities within the world wide web. This paper
discusses K-Net and MyKnet.org as agents of an indigenous cyber or
digital activism that aims to change living conditions in the region’s
remote and isolated communities.
Max Schrems (AT)
Europe versus Facebook
The first part of the presentation will explain the data use of
Facebook by focusing on the background data our group got by making
access request at Facebook. The second part will focus on some of the
complaints that we filed against Facebook, claiming that their use of
personal data is illegal under European data protection regulations. By
the time of the presentation there will also be the first results of
these complaints that will be analyzed in the presentation. Additionally
questions concerning the factual monopoly of Facebook, alternative ways
of shaping social networks and user duties under European data
protection laws will be discussed.
Eleanor Saitta (USA)
Networks and Nation States
Moving from a centralized, institution-driven culture to a network
structure would imply massive disruption even without the simultaneous
failure of neoliberalized capital and onrushing climactic and resource
catastrophe. As we understand of our current position, we must expect
an unprecedented degree of societal disruption. The shape of that
disruption is determined in part by the nature of institution to network
transition. If we want to understand this disruption, we have to
start here.
In this talk, we’re going to look at a couple of specific, concrete
projects that point to that shape, namely the Constitutional Analysis
Support Team and our work in conducting a threat model of the
Icelandic constitution and the Sukey project in London, a crowd-sourced,
distributed, real-time activist counterintelligence system. With these
projects, we’ll paint a picture of the structures of
institutional failure and reconstitution and what a hollow institution
looks like in practice. We’ll close with discussion of the problems of
institutional discretion and the jurisprudence of networks.
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