The essay Critical Masses, Commerce, and Shifting State-Society Relations in China, recently published on The China Beat blog, is based on the script of a talk that Professor of Media Culture at the City University of New York Ying Zhu gave at Google’s New York offices on February 12, 2010. In her talk, Zhu focused on Google’s precarious relationship with China, but also on the reception of James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ in Chinese theaters in order to investigate the concept of China’s emerging “critical masses” as constitutive of a quasi-public sphere invested with people power. Announcing Zhu’s talk in early February, the China Beat states:

No longer isolated, nameless masses, today’s Chinese audiences and social media users are critical masses: “critical” to the tenure of a one-party state that is no longer in a position to easily put down a popular rebellion; “critical” in the sense that they identify problems and demand, and indeed shape, state action; and “critical” in the sense that they constitute ready networks of audience members and information consumers with the potential to be moved to collective action by a catalyzing event or issue that transforms passive association into active participation in a critical mass of like-minded citizens expressing their passion in forums ranging from online debates to street-level demonstrations or even extended political or cultural campaigns. Zhu argues that media-centered critical masses are a central dynamic of China’s changing state-society relationship. Additionally, she suggests that this emerging dynamic is not limited to China, and identifies points of convergence between China and the West in politics and political participation. She proposes that the electoral politics of established democracies and the regime-sustaining politics of authoritarian states alike are trending toward a quasi-democratic “politics with globalized characteristics,” with important prospects and problems in common.

In addition to Zhu’s talk at Google, the follow-up essay features added sections by Ying Zhu and Bruce Robinson meant to tease out the issues that were left without further elaboration due to time constraints.

The Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) is an organisation aiming to enrich the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. After being nominated for the Transmediale Award 2010, F.A.T. Lab members met up in Berlin in the first week of February and produced a series of projects dedicated to the topic of the week: FUCK GOOGLE. In addition to producing free software, browser addons, live streams, communiques and on-site workshops, F.A.T. Lab built a fake Google Street View car they took to the streets to see what it’s like to be Google. A PDF with building instructions and a list of needed materials has been made available on the F.A.T. website, along with a host of video material. Read about all the week’s projects here.

On monday March 1, Dutch newspaper NRC Next devoted two pages to articles on Google. One article by Peter Teffer, ”Maakt het internet ons dommer?” (does the Internet dumb us down?) features an interview with Geert Lovink. The other article is an experiment by two NRC reporters, Teffer and Pfauth, who attempted to live and work without the use of any Google service for a week. The article and report (both in Dutch) are online here.

In the last week of January, an NYU graduate class conducted a similar experiment, see an earlier blog post on it here.

NYU professor Mushon Zer Aviv and his graduate class in (new) Media (networked) Culture and (distributed) Communication met quite a challenge this past week as the class assignment was to live and work for a full week without using any Google service. Read about the assignment, the rules and the outcomes on http://cultureandcommunication.org/tdm/s10/admin/a-week-without-google/, and be sure to check the comments.

Michael Stevenson is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. For the Society of the Query evening program he presented a very interesting selection of artistic and activist projects that were engaged with (the re-attribution of) different elements related to Web search.

Query

The IP-Browser (Govcom.org) for instance played with the linearity of querying the Web. It creates an alternative browsing experience that foregrounds the Web’s machine habitat and returns the user back to the basics of orderly Web browsing. The IP Browser looks up your IP address, and allows you to browse the Websites in your IP neighborhood, one by one in the order in which they are given in the IP address space.

Shmoogle (Tsila Hassine/De Geuzen) also deals with linearity on the Web, specifically the linearity of the search returns of Google. De Geuzen state that the best search returns that Google offers are not necessarily always the ones at the top. Unfortunately this is where the average Google user gets stuck. Shmoogle offers a way to find the search results in a chaotic way, and in doing so it ensures greater democracy.

The Internet Says No (Constant Dullaart) is a animated, fully functioning Google page (Google is placed in a marquee-frame). this work offers a pessimistic way to surf the internet.

The Misspelling-Generator (Linda Hilfling & Erik Borra). Erik Borra presented the work as a result of the fight against internet censorship. When doing a search in the Chinese version of Google on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Linda Hilfling discovered a temporary loophole out of the Google self-censorship in China. By deliberately spelling Tiananmen incorrectly, she was taken to web-pages where other people had misspelled Tiananmen, and was thereby able to access pictures of demonstrations as well as the legendary image of the student in front of the tank through the sources of incorrect spellings. The Misspelling generator is a tool that can be used for internet activism. By writing variations like ‘tianamen’ and ‘tiananman’ the isolation politics of the Google’s spelling corrector can be subverted while Google’ selfcensorship can be circumvented.

Images

Z.A.P. (ApFab) is an automatic image generation installation. First you add a word using the ApFab touch-screen, then the ZapMachine will grab an image from the Internet. This image is the most important visual representation of that word, at that time, according to the current Internet authority Google. Finally, the individual images are incorporated into a new context, creating a new tense state of meaning and random relations. With “Zapmachine: Who gave you the right?” AbFab is asking the following questions:

-How much control do we have over the generated collage as artists?
-How much influence do you have on this process.
-How does the collage relate to the initial intention by which the image was uploaded on the Internet by the original author?
-Who is the author of this Zap collage?

Disease Disco (Constant Dullaart) “To every suffering its thumbnail”. Dullaart used the Google image search by color option, to query the word ‘disease’ and changes color ‘rhytmically’. The work is accompanied by the US billboard #1 hit song of the moment that the work was created.

The Global Anxiety Monitor (De Geuzen) uses html-frames to display automated image searches in different languages. Searching in Google for terms such as conflict, terrorism and climate change, this monitor traces the ebb and flow of fear in Arabic, Hebrew, English and Dutch.

Terms & Conditions

Cookie Monster (Andrea Fiore) To capture on-line behavior, thousands of HTTP cookies are sent daily to web browsers to identify users and gather statistical knowledge about tastes and habits. The cookie consensus website hosts a collection of cookies that Andrea Fiore received while surfing through the first 50 entries of the Alexa directory of News sites. In the future it will also host a software that will give the users the capability to create their own cookie collections.

I Love Alaska (Lernert Engelberts & Sander Plug) is a beautifully framed internet movie series that tells the story of a middle aged woman living in Houston, Texas. The viewer follows her AOL search queries over the time span of months. “In the end, when she cheats on her husband with a man she met online, her life seems to crumble around her. She regrets her deceit, admits to her Internet addiction and dreams of a new life in Alaska.”

Flarf poetry can be characterized as an avant-garde poetry movement of the late 20th and the early 21st century. In flarf poetry a poet roams the Internet using random word searches, to distill newly created phrases and bizarre constructions that he later shares with the flarf community.

Flarf poetry can be described as a ‘readymade’, collage technique that has connections to the Surrealists in the 20s and William Burroughs cut-up technique from 1959. Flarf itself exists for a decade and has since then evolved by using web poetry generators and chatbots like Jabberwacky.

Ton van het Hof showed an example of flarf by Sharen Mesmer: “A knowing diabetic bitch”

This is my Readymade Flarf poem using Jabberwacky:

What is Flarf? The greatest two dimensional thing in the world. What is Flarf? A Flatland. It’s a satire on this one.

Although my self made poem doesn’t show this so well (I am unfortunately an amateur flarf poet), flarf poems are often as disturbing as they are hilarious, which have made many people question if flarf will can ever be taken serious. Even though this question is still a valid question today, the movement is showing signs to have cleared a spot amongst the ranks of the legitimate art forms, finding its ways to blogs, magazines and conferences.

Notes and discussion on The Society of the Query are public on Google Wave:

You can find them here:

with:public “Notes on Society of the Query”

The Ippolita Collective brought a humorous and refreshing change of perspective into the attempt to search and formulate solutions for one of the issues addressed by the second session of the Society of the Query conference, namely Digital Civil Rights. They proposed to change the “what” style of questioning associated with positions of domination, as in “what is to be done?” into a “how” style of approaching issues in order to avoid surrendering to fear, paranoia or the desire to control and protect every aspect of your interactions with technology. While if you ask yourself the “what” questions you may end up in paranoid positions such as  luddism  or technocracy, if you have the “how” attitude, then you are a curious individual, with a desire to learn and to understand, to share and exchange knowledge with others. You may even be some sort of hacker.

The “how” attitude, an attitude which will bring you to media literacy, is, as the Ippolita Collective explains, a convivial model. As opposed to the industrial model of productivity, the convivial model implies maintaining autonomy, creativity and personal freedom in interaction with individuals or technology. How would one build up this model of conviviality? The answer, according to the artistic and research group is to build convivial tools! A convivial tool is not something that you can purchase but something that you have to build yourself in order to have it match your own needs. It is something that you enjoy creating, like making your own wiki.

Can the convivial attitude be applied in approaching our Google/ digital rights/ privacy issues? The Ippolita Collective already has, and the result is a tool named SCookies which you can download for free here. The application takes its slogan, “Share your Cookies!” literally and mixes your cookies with the cookies of other individuals who have installed it, in order to alter your profile and render it unreliable. While it may not be the solution, the SCookies application is emblematic of a style, an attitude of approaching an issue such as digital civil rights.

The Ippolita Collective has recently finished a book on Google, The Dark Side of Google, which you can download for free from their website.

Matteo Pasquinelli’s presentation this morning at the Society of the Query was based on his paper, Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect. The paper can be downloaded from his website.

The essay and presentation of the Italian media theorist and critic focused on an alternative direction for research in the field of critical Internet/ Google studies. He proposed a shift of focus from Google’s power and monopoly and the associated critique in Foucauldian fashion developed within fields such as surveillance studies, to the “political economy of the PageRank algorithm.” According to Pasquinelli, the PageRank algorithm is the base of Google’s power and an emblematic and effective diagram for cognitive capitalism.

Google’s PageRank algorithm determines the value of a website according to the number of inlinks received by a webpage. The algorithm was inspired by the academic publications’ citation system, in which the value of an academic publication is determined by the number of quotations received by the journal’s articles. Pasquinelli takes this algorithm as a starting point in order to introduce into critical studies the notion of “network surplus-value,” a notion inspired by Guatarri’s notion of “machinic surplus value.”

The Google PageRank diagram is the most effective diagram of the cognitive economy because it makes visible precisely this aspect characteristic of the cognitive economy, namely network value. Network value adds up to the more established notions of commodity use value and exchange value. Network value refers to the circulation value of a commodity. The pollination metaphor used by the first speaker, Yann Moulier Boutang, is useful in understanding network value. Each one of us as “click workers” contributes to the production and accumulation of network value, which is further being embedded in lucrative activities, such as Google’s advertising model. While in the knowledge economy a particular emphasis is placed on intellectual property, the notion of cognitive rent to which Matteo Pasquinelli draws attention becomes useful here. Google as “rentier of the common intellect” refers to the way in which free content produced with the free labour of individuals browsing the internet is being indexed by Google and used in profit generating activities.  From this perspective Pasquinelli challenges Lessing’s notion of “free culture” in that Google offers a platform and certain services for free, but each one of us contributes to the Google business when performing a search, data which is being fed into the page ranking algorithm. The use of the notion of common intellect or collective intelligence in this context is however debatable, as shown in the discussion session which followed the presentation, because there is only a certain relatively limited segment of individuals – the users which contribute content to the web – , whose linking activity is being fed into the PageRank algorithm. The prominence of the PageRank algorithm as generator of network value has also been questioned, as the algorithm is not the only ranking instrument. As the posting on Henk van Ess’ website shows, human evaluators also participate in page ranking.

What is there to be done about Google’s accumulation of value by means of exploitation of the common intellect? Or to use Pasquinelli’s metaphor, are there alternatives to Google’s parasitizing of the collective production of knowledge? How can this value be re-appropriated? As the speaker suggested, perhaps through voluntary hand made indexing of the web? Or an open page rank algorithm? Or perhaps a trust rank? This question is still open.

“In a society of the query, it’s an interesting question to ask what happens to all those queries, what legal norms apply to the registration, processing and access to these queries, and do these norms successfully safeguard the more fundamental interests of search engine users: a free realm to seek and access information and ideas,” began Joris van Hoboken at The Society of The Query conference this afternoon.

Hoboken is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, writing his dissertation about search engines and freedom of expression. His research investigates the impact of legal norms on the users’ freedom, and today at The Society of the Query he focused on the question, “Does privacy still exist in an environment of search.”

Accessing Our Data From Search Engines
Hoboken rightfully admitted that most users have a lack of knowledge about data protection. Corporations behind popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and AOL are storing a plethora of user data (query logs, IP, time, cookies etc), and what most people don’t know is that EU law grants users “the right to access any personal data stored about them.”

For example, Article 12 (European Union Directive 95/46/EC) reads, “Member States shall guarantee every data subject the right to obtain from the controller: [...] knowledge of the logic involved in any automatic processing of data concerning him. [...] When applied specifically to search engines, users must have the right to access any personal data stored about them.” Which brings Hoboken to the question: why are we so passive in enforcing these rights?

Exercising Our Rights To Our Data
In 2006 AOL purposefully released 20 million partially anonymized search queries. Hoboken reminded us of how seemingly innocuous data can be pieced together and traced back to our identifies, as was the case with AOL user #4417749 who, based on the content of her web queries, was later identified as 62-year old widow Thelma Arnold. Online you exist as a number, but data is never completely anonymized. Hoboken laments, “AOL thought it would be good for researchers, and it’s a bit unfortunate that the backlash from this experiment means that it is now much harder for the public to get a hold of search data. Search data that is important for scholars to do do research.”

Although there are opportunities for accessing this information, the application of law sometimes falls short. Hoboken lists three problems that we run into when attempting to access our data from search engines, “These companies are opaque, divorced from reality, and they advocate data storage with reference to repressive purposes.” In his presentation he points to examples of these problems echoed in  Google’s retention policy and in an NPR with Google co-founder Eric Schmidt (see slides * coming soon).

“We really have to worry about the extended amount of data being stored,” says Hoboken, “but fortunately there are many laws already established to protect us and our data.” He challenges us to take advantage of these laws and to ask more questions. And while it may not be possible to anatomize the data being collected, the fate of online privacy lies in our understanding of these laws and in our ability to exercise the rights that will protect our data from being (ab)used.

By rob