Posted: June 5, 2013 at 12:27 pm | By: Serena Westra | Tags: conference report, overview, PDF, report, Unlike Us#3
We have completed a conference report about Unlike Us #3; it is a great summary of the project. The report consists of an overview of the key results, the program of the conference and all the research and conference blogposts concerning the project. The file is in English.
In case you are interested, you can find the pdf here.
Posted: April 25, 2013 at 9:18 am | By: Andrew Erlanger |
It’s been an exciting few years for the Unlike Us initiative, with three conferences, a published reader, an iPad magazine and countless blog posts. Adopting a unique perspective that combines artistic, academic and activistic elements, both social media monopolies and their decentralized alternatives have been analysed in great detail. With Unlike Us #3 having drawn to a close, now is a good time to consider the future of the project. For this reason, the Institute of Network Cultures has put together ‘Unlike Us: Looking Ahead’, which addresses Unlike Us #4 and the ‘bigger picture’ along with key themes and workshop ideas. You can check it out for yourself here: UU#3 Looking Ahead
Posted: April 24, 2013 at 3:32 pm | By: Andrew Erlanger |
Unlike Us #3 is now online! If you missed out on this year’s conference or would like to experience it again, be sure to check out our Vimeo channel, where each presentation can be viewed in its entirety:
https://vimeo.com/channels/unlikeus3
Taking place in Amsterdam from the 22nd to the 23rd of March, Unlike Us #3 featured the following speakers:
Friday, March 22
Session #1 – Theory and Critique of ‘the Social’
Session #2 – Are You Distributed? The Federated Web Show
Session #3 – Political Economy of Social Networks: Art & Practice
Saturday, March 23
Session #1 – Mobile Use of Social Media
Session #2 – Facebook Riot: Join or Decline
Posted: March 27, 2013 at 12:09 pm | By: Serena Westra | Tags: Conference, dj eindbaas, john haltiwanger, op de valreep, pary, squat, unlike us #3
The second conference day of Unlike Us #3 ended with a smashing party at Op de Valreep. Op de Valreep used to be an old animal shelter, but the building functions now as a squat with a big variety of cultural, political, and social events. It appeared to be the perfect – although a bit cold – location for the Unlike Us participants, speakers, fanatics and hackers to have a party.
DJ Eindbaas and John Haltiwanger – photo by Anne Helmond
Posted: March 26, 2013 at 4:15 pm | By: Katía Truijen | Tags: bernard stiegler, networking, neuropower, noopolitics, transindividuation | 5 Comments
Unlike Us #3 has begun, and we start immediately with the very essence of social media, namely the conception of ‘the social’, and how this is transformed by social media today. Before we will zoom in to the practices of e.g. the Facebook Demetricator and Anti-Social Media later today, we are now still zoomed out, we see the bigger picture. Bernard Stiegler gives us a lecture about how neuropower is involved in social networks, and how we should use these kind of networks for a new knowledge politics. Hold on!
First of all, I highly encourage you to read the article of Bernard Stiegler in the Unlike Us Reader: “The Most Precious Good in the Era of Social Technologies”. In this article, he launches the concepts that he uses in his argument today.
Bernard Stiegler (Photo by Martin Risseeuw)
Reversing the pharmacological direction of social networks
In this essay, Stiegler starts with the conception of philia, the fundament of the social. It exists because we are by necessity bound to others. Philia exists between individuals, but also between communities. In fact, it is the most precious good of individual human beings. Without it, life is not worth living. It is also the most precious good for societies, because philia constitutes linking power, which is also the power to create social networks. It constitutes a process of individuation, because one desires the other. Technical individuation both augments and diminishes psychic and collective individuation, as Stiegler explains later on.
Posted: March 25, 2013 at 4:36 pm | By: Serena Westra | Tags: facebook, Facebook Resistance, hacking, Marc Stumpel, tobias leingruber, Unlike Us!, workshop
Marc Stumpel and Tobias Leingruber organized the Facebook Resistance workshop for Unlike Us on Friday evening at the Studio HvA. Marc Stumpel is a new media researcher form Amsterdam and has been involved with Unlike Us from the outset. He is part of the Facebook Resistance project and has written about Facebook Resistance for the Unlike Us reader. Tobias Leingruber is a German designer and artist and is known for his Facebook Identity card project, which he talked about earlier in the day. The Facebook Resistance workshop was a very interactive and practical workshop and many participants ended up with a completely new (and sometimes even unreadable) version of Facebook – including moving gifs.
Tobias Leingruber at the Medialab
So how can you change your Facebook?
First of all, it is good to know that Facebook won’t even notice the changes you make; you will only change how the browser will process Facebooks code with the tools provided by Marc and Tobias. This is called augmented browsing and can be performed with browser add-ons like Greasemonkey, a Firefox add-on that allows end-users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to HTML-based web pages. Marc and Tobias are not that interested in ‘pimping’ their profiles to just make them more aesthetically appealing, they prefer changing Facebook to make enhancements to the user experience. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: March 25, 2013 at 4:14 pm | By: Andrew Erlanger | Tags: activism, politics, revolution, Simona Levi, Spanish protests
The tools of the web pose unique opportunities to transform overarching political structures, spawning real and positive change at a fundamental level. Rounding out the second day of Unlike Us #3, Spanish activist Simona Levi took the stage to reflect on what we’ve learned from the internet and how this might be extrapolated to all spaces of struggle. More specifically, she emphasised the power of the social network to reconfigure existing paradigms and cultivate a more democratic system of governance.
Photo by Martin Risseeuw
The immense pervasion of centralized organizations is such that we have traditionally accepted them as the norm. Levi argued that by using the internet we are starting to appreciate that no one node is more important than the others, with this novel perspective creating greater potential for the individual as a catalyst.
Posted: March 25, 2013 at 1:36 pm | By: freyjavandenboom | Tags: Bits of Freedom, halink, privacy, transparency, unlike us #3
Since our lives increasingly take place online we leave behind all sorts of personal data about what we like, what we do and where we are.
This might not be of concern to those who claim they have nothing to hide but most of us, though perhaps not as much as those who joined Project X in Haren, are guilty of at least some youthful indiscretions. And even if you have never posted a regretful tweet or downloaded an mp3, would you not want to know what information your government is collecting from your use of Google and Facebook?
Photo by Martin Risseeuw
Simone Halink, from Bits of Freedom, came to talk about their struggle with the Dutch government about matters of internet privacy and transparency in relation to data requests. Technology can deeply infiltrate our private lives and since the Dutch government has been careless with privacy issues in the past it is all the more important to know what user data they have been given access to from companies such as Twitter and Google.
Posted: March 25, 2013 at 12:01 pm | By: Serena Westra | Tags: anti-social, art, political art, Simona Lodi, unlike us #3
Simona Lodi took the stage fore the third session of UnlikeUs #3 – Political Economy of Social Networks: Art & Practice. Lodi is an Italian art critic and curator and she is interested in the relationship between art and technology. In her work she is focusing on methods and language, and the relation between social and political dynamics. For Unlike Us she talked about anti-social art and showed different interesting art projects. The collection consists of illegal art, social media processes and social and political performances. Lodi argues that the point of anti-social art is primarily political.
Photo by Martin Risseeuw
1. The Anti-Social app
For how many minutes would you like to be anti-social? With this app you can block yourself from being social on the internet, or at least from being social on Facebook, Twitter and other sites you specify. Lodi wants to show with this app that you can become more socially compatible when being anti-social at the same time. By anti-social Lodi does not mean unfriendly; the application is meant more in the tradition of negative dialectics which stand in contrast to projects like Hate-book. The anti-social is just an artistic example, nevertheless, Lodi emphasizes that there is a growing need for regular people to be anti-social in daily life.
http://anti-social.cc/
Posted: March 25, 2013 at 11:13 am | By: freyjavandenboom | Tags: mobile, mxit, south africa, walton
Being in the Netherlands – where smartphones have become a common sight and almost every household has at least one computer with access to the internet – it is sometimes easy to forget this is not the case in many other parts of the world.
Photo by Martin Risseeuw
In South Africa, where Marion Walton is a senior researcher on mobile communication, most young people do not own a smartphone and using mobile internet is too expensive.
“Marie Antoinette would be proud that because of the high cost of communication there is a chilling effect on political discourse for poor people,” said Ms Walton.
