Internet Technologies

Back from my visit to Project EPIC in Boulder, and right to the opening keynote of the 2013 Association of Internet Researchers conference. The keynote speaker is Gabriella Coleman, whose focus is on cyberactivism. Computer hacking has taken an increasingly prominent role in society in recent years - hackers have engaged in disrupting communication through DDoS attacks as well as in increasing transparency through leaking information.

But what are hackers? Some programme software, some develop hardware; some promote transparency (e.g. through the free software movement), some operate from the anonymous underground. Put simply, hacking is where craft and craftiness …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Tessa Houghton, who begins by noting the 2009 New Zealand blackout of Websites and avatars, in protest against new copyright legislation. This is a form of spectacular viral publicity, and has been repeated in a number of national contexts over the past years – variously protesting copyright or Internet regulations. The anti-SOPA/PIPA blackout of early 2012 is another example for this.

Socially mediated antagonistic publicity is increasingly characteristic for such protests; for all the differences between the specific publics involved in the protests, it highlights contemporary configurations of power. This departs …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Constance Kampf, whose interest is in online activism. There are a number of different forms and levels of activism, of course – from a general expression of support for specific causes to radical and potentially dangerous interventions. Much online activism has been driven by issues of transparency, but that term is ill-defined: does it just mean the openness and availability of information about known phenomena, or also an absence of unknowns?

Another key issue in this is the role of knowledge as a cultural resource: transparency can become a socio-technical construct …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2012 plenary is Terri Senft, who argues for a department of Shameless Studies. Is anyone actually shameless? We all constantly negotiate our shame, for all sorts of reasons; we are in solidarity with one another where we share a specific form of shame.

Similarly, we gather online around shared topics; an early example of such gathering was the early Web's Camgirl movement, and so often the people engaging in these topics were also considered to be too much, too shameless, even though what happened here is to ease one's shame, to empower oneself.

To …

The next plenary session at AoIR 2012 starts with Daniel Miller, who describes enthnography as often grand in its ambitions, but sometimes a little parochial in its work – how do you go about developing some of the wider theory about technology and what it means to be human, for example? What needs to happen here is a move between the broad and the specific.

Anthropologists see the substance of being human in social relations; how can technology, as an external factor, be related to this? Work on the use of communication technologies by disabled people points towards possible directions …

The post-lunch keynote at AoIR 2012 is by Liesbet van Zoonen, who begins with a recap of cultural theories of identity. These assume both individual and collective identities to be multiple rather than single, dynamic rather than static. Identity is something we do, not something we are. Research has been informed by these ideas, and we have a good understanding of how different groups use media to perform their identities. This has also been reflected in an understanding of diversity as a desirable goal for social policy.

There has been less attention on recent forces that work against the multiplicity …

The final plenary speaker in this opening session at AoIR 2012 is Susanna Paasonen, who highlights the question of what the object of Internet research really is. This has often been described in terms of loss – loss of material aspects of research objects – as well as gain – the benefits of disembodiment.

Materiality in Internet studies involves the materials of Internet technology, but also the material conditions of global labour, money, commodity, and resource flows. Here, a focus can be on the conflicting aims of different actors. Second, much recent research has been focussed on the practices of …

The first AoIR 2012 plenary begins with Mary L. Gray, whose interest is in moving past technology-centric work in Internet studies. Rather, life is entangled with Internet technologies: the study of media should be used to draw out larger questions, and Internet research needs to be an interdiscipline concerned with boundary work.

Early on, cultivation theory dominated media studies, but domestication theory finally provided a more sophisticated view of the adoption and adaptation of media technologies; but this also overlooked the reinscription of normative users to the exclusion of other user groups, who were considered to be outsiders and always …

And I've arrived at the 2012 Association of Internet Researchers conference – my annual pilgrimage to catch up with the family. We start with a quick burst of Ignite talks, which itself begins with John Carter McKnight. He notes the two fundamental axioms of video games studies: games teach, and games don't teach. The Red Cross has posed the question: Is there a way for first-person shooter games to include a more accuracy representation of international humanitarian law? Such laws are not especially firm, of course - much different from the rules in video games, which are more like gravity …