Blogs

Seattle.
Kathleen Kuehn is the next speaker at AoIR 2011; her paper is inspired by protest events against the apparently racist attitudes of the operators a local swimming pool which were conducted with the help of the local services consumer review site Yelp. Yelp provides a space for user-created reviews ; how is such consumer-reviewing perceived by users?

This work uses Alvin Toffler’s prosumption concept; consumer reviewing of local products and services can be described as a form of prosumption (and echoing the alternative explanation of ‘prosumption’, participating users may also be thought of as professional consumers). Ideas of consumer-citizenship – consumption as an expression of political will – also come into play here, of course.

Seattle.
The second presenter in this AoIR 2011 session is Mario Orefice, whose focus is on the political uses of Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms. There is a growing mistrust of political institutions and actors in western countries, due to a gradual loss of their representative and democratic mission, increased disruptive influence exerted by lobbyists, and the disappearance of traditional forms of identification and effective systems of representation between citizens and parties. This has led to a shift from dutiful citizenship (imposed by the state) to self-actualising citizenship (determined by personal goals).

Mario’s project examined the top ten most-liked Facebook pages of Italian politicians (with likes seen as an indicator of popularity); the content of these pages was analysed using Discovertext between 25 June and 26 September this year. Coding categories for this content were support, action, organisation, and representation.

Seattle.
OK, I walked in a little late to the first AoIR 2011 presentation this morning, by Michele Willson, whose focus is on information filtering. There are different approaches to such filtering: at the user or at the service end, initiated by users or by the system, cognitive or social filtering, and based on knowledge about the user’s interests which may be acquired through a range of different mechanisms.

Different stakeholders in the process, and in developing these processes, will have a range of different agendas and interests – developers have specific algorithms they may wish to explore, funding bodies and sources have specific commercial or other imperatives, users and their friends are interested in particular forms of online activity (content sharing, phatic communication, etc.), and the social network providers overall are interested in increasing participant numbers and boost the stickiness of the platform.

Seattle.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Amoshaun Toft, who is looking at three cases of multilevel communication networks: action against homelessness, a direct action tent city for homeless people, and the building of a new jail which would be likely to hold many homeless locked up for minor misdemeanours.

Politics is the struggle over meaning, and such meaning is relational and contingent. People contest meaning through political action by connecting discourses. Issues organise social action, in specific discursive fields, in particular organisational fields, or through issue industries focussed on given issue areas.

Seattle.
The next speaker in this AoIR 2011 session is Ashley Hinck, whose focus is specifically on the 2011 Wisconsin Protests against the eradication of collective bargaining rights. These protests involved conventional in-person protests and demonstrations, calls and letter-writing, but also a range of online activities from simple expressions of sympathy to more sophisticated forms of organising; this may impact institutions, but may also simply be an expression of personal identity – but yet it’s also more than these two basic forms of citizenship.

What’s necessary, then, is to consider citizenship beyond these conventional definitions – to consider how citizenship is performed: the modalities of citizenship. Voting out of a sense of duty to a candidate, or voting to prevent the election of another candidate, are two very different actions, for example.

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Dave Karpf, examining the MoveOn effect. There are two robust findings around Internet politics in the U.S.: the idea of organising without organisations is well established, and the re-emergence of political elites in mass activities online. A third level which has been largely ignored, however, is the organisational level of politics: organising with different organisations.

The labour protests in Wisconsin provide an interesting example for this. What happened here was a rapid cooperation by Net-root organisations, from MoveOn through political blogs and fundraising sites to community Websites. All of them are Internet organisations, and different from legacy advocacy organisations. Three ideal types exist here: a hub-and-spokes model (like MoveOn, orchestrated by a small central staff), a neo-federated model (coordinating strong affiliate groups around the country), and online communities of interest (with an online membership coming together through the site itself).

Seattle.
The next AoIR 2011 session starts with Alex Farivar, whose interest is in mobile phone diffusion; such diffusion has also been an important driver of economic development and democratisation in a number of countries, it has been claimed. Alex’s project examined some 122 countries for the years 1946 through to 2009, studying economic growth patterns and examining (in more recent years) the role of Internet and mobile diffusion. Similarities in economic positioning, geographic context, and other factors were also considered.

Does mobile and Internet diffusion predict economic growth; does socioeconomic instability or democratic instability hinder such growth? Variables here included world system positioning (core, semi-peripheral, peripheral), income, democratic development, mobile and Internet diffusion, sociopolitical instability, urbanisation, population, and time and region.

Seattle.
The first keynote at AoIR 2011 is by Mike Monello (who was also the producer of the Blair Witch Project). He begins by noting the importance of team collaboration, and says that Blair Witch emerged as a completely organic process involving its principal creators. The filmmakers wanted the dialogue to be completely improvised, and so created a deep mythology for the Blair Witch story; some of the (very realistic) clips recorded for the film were then broadcast on TV, and audiences were encouraged to go to the online community Split Screen to discuss whether what they’d seen was real.

The massive success of this online discussion then led to the setting-up of the Blair Witch Project Website, which contained the underlying mythology – fans speculated on the message boards and developed theories of what was going on, and the filmmakers themselves almost accidentally became involved in the story as filmmakers, therefore. While there was nothing on the site to identify the story as fiction, there was never any intention to mislead – and the site linked to information about the production process, too.

Seattle.
The final speaker in this AoIR 2011 session is Kate O’Riordan. Her interest is in the biodigital sequencing of the human genome and its representation in digital culture. Genomes are ‘born-digital’ artefacts, and have become a widespread trope in digital culture; a substantial number of Websites provide information on human genomics through databases, browsers, sequences, scans, wikis, and blogs; genome stories told by emerging celebrities in the field are coming to increasing prominence.

Genome sequences are generated through very abstract computational processes; how is such information made meaningful, and by whom? This is a story of the construction of a specific technocratic elite, offering a promise that everybody might some time soon be equally empowered; it’s a story of genetics and behaviour. Genomic research is now also shifting towards the analysis of multiple genomes, and celebrity (auto)biographies are attached to this shift.

Seattle.
The next AoIR 2011 speaker is Aristea Fotopoulou, whose interest is in digital networks. She focusses on the Feminism conference in London in 2009, using both ethnographic and Webcrawling methods. The conference is connected with the wider London Feminist Network, which not least engages with recent political changes in the UK. The network reframes views on violence against women, prostitution and pornography, but Aristea’s ethnographic work was able to trace a range of different versions of feminist identity.

Older divisions are reinvoked in networked conditions, and an imaginary perspective of feminism as a movement is evoked in the process; a continuing anxiety about catching up with digital technologies underpins some of these activities, too. In digital environments, doing network politics is being remediated through these imaginaries.