CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS:
Unlike Us Reader: Understanding Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives

INTRODUCTION
Following the success of the previous INC readers we would like to propose to put together a reader with key texts (see under below for possible topics). Anthology (print, pdf, epub) produced by the Institute of Network Cultures in collaboration with the Unlike Us research network. Following the second Unlike Us conference in Amsterdam, the Institute of Network Cultures is devoted to produce a reader that bundles actual theories about the economic and cultural aspects of dominant social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, and the development of alternative, decentralized social media software.

POSSIBLE TOPICS
Critical Twitter Studies // Artistic Responses to Social Media // Genealogies of Social Networking Sites // Biopolitics // Exploitation of Immaterial Labour // Social Media Activism and the Critique of Liberation Technology // Social What? Defining the Social // Software Matters: Sociotechnical and Algorithmic Cultures // The Private in the Public // Showcasing Alternatives in Social Media // Pitfalls of Building Alternatives

WE INVITE
Internet, visual culture and media scholars, researchers, artists, curators, producers, lawyers, engineers, open-source and open-content advocates, activists, Unlike Us conference participants, and others to submit materials and proposals.

FORMATS

We welcome interviews, dialogues, essays and articles, images (b/w), email exchanges, manifestos, with a max of 8,000 words. For scope and style, take a look at the previous INC readers and the style guide.

This publication is produced by the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam and will be launched late 2012, ready in time for a possible Unlike Us #3 (no details known yet about the date and place).

DEADLINE: August 20, 2012

SEND CONTRITBUTIONS: miriam[at]networkcultures[dot]org (Miriam Rasch)
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By Serena Westra

Facebook makes us unhappy is the main premise of Dutch author Koen Damhuis. In his new book ‘De Virtuele Spiegel; Waarom Facebook ons Ongelukkig Maakt’ (The Virtual Mirror; Why Facebook makes us Unhappy) he is examining his generation, Generation Y, which is raised in a society with high expectations and no room for failure. According to him, the ubiquitous presence of Facebook makes us unhappy because we are confronted with all the things we did not accomplish and chances we did not take. Facebook friends always seem to look better, prettier and more successful. ‘Facebook provides the possibility to get closer to perfection; consequently the discrepancy between the ordinary world and our virtual image of the world gets bigger. […] It becomes harder and harder to accept failure, especially for Generation Y that want’s everything’ (Damhuis, 2012).

In The Virtual Mirror Damhuis gives three options to deal with this issue. First self-improvement: be better then your Facebook friends. You can use Facebook to hide your authentic self and to ‘fake it till you make it’. Second: have fewer ambitions. Creating borders in a borderless world might be a solution, because giving up your ambitions can be just as fulfilling as succeeding. The third option is a combination of both: try to be better than your friends, but accept failure too.

According to Damhuis we are living in a performance culture. Instead of accepting the fact that we are not necessarily the prettiest or most important person in the world, we oblige each other to see ourselves as special. Facebook helps us with this from commercial grounds – the more personalized the profile, the more personalized the advertisement can be – and provides us with the space we need to do this. Virtually we all look pretty and exceptional. ‘You are putting on a mask to hide your own mediocrity – we are all doing this in front of the virtual mirror.’

However, on his quest to find the reason why Facebook makes Generation Y unhappy, Damhuis forgets one important thing: to look at Facebook itself. New media critic Lev Manovich believes that an analysis cannot be complete until we consider the software layer. ‘All disciplines which deal with contemporary society and culture – architecture, design, art criticism, sociology, political science, humanities, science and technology studies, and so on – need to account for the role of software and its effects in whatever subjects they investigate’ (Manovich, 2008). Software is still invisible to most academics and the use of software studies in combination with sociology is not applied often. Yet, the implementation of software studies in Damhuis’ research would have provided a more complete image. For example, how does Facebook’s software encourage the self-promoting machine? And how exactly do users construct themselves in a perfect way on Facebook?

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Door Michelle Oosthuyzen en Marc Stumpel

Naar aanleiding van het nieuwe boek van internetjournalist Peter Olsthoorn, De macht van Facebook, werd er op donderdag 26 april in de Waag Society Amsterdam een debat georganiseerd met als doel een kritische blik te werpen op de implicaties van de macht van Facebook als sociaal medium op onze samenleving.

Het panel dat werd geleid door Frank Kresin, research director van de Waag Society en Peter Olsthoorn, bestond verder uit:
- Karin Spaink, columniste voor Het Parool en internetfilosoof.
- Antoinette Hoes, Head of Strategy Tribal DDB, een online reclamebureau.
- Steven Jongeneel, directeur van Social Embassy, een bedrijf dat social media als commerciële tool inzet om doelgroepen te bereiken.

Hoewel ons sociaal gedrag ‘normaal’ wordt gevonden, is het volgens Olsthoorn belangrijk om stil te staan bij de vraag hoe ons sociaal gedrag wordt geprogrammeerd door het gebruik van technologie. Met deze intentie heeft hij dan ook zijn nieuwste boek geschreven. De macht van dominante social media platformen zoals Facebook wordt enerzijds door de gebruikers als bevrijdend of zelfs verwonderend ervaren. Daarnaast biedt social media nieuwe handvatten aan commerciële bedrijven om op een vernieuwende manier klaten aan zich te binden. Anderzijds is ook de paradox van vrijheid voelbaar waarbij gebruikers zich hebben te houden aan de regels van Facebook en hun persoonlijke informatie geëxploiteerd wordt. Olsthoorn verkent in zijn boek diverse facetten van het sociale netwerk en zet hier zijn vraagtekens en soms ook uitroeptekens bij: “Hoe gaan we hier nu mee om? Dit gebeurt niet ‘gewoon’!”.Tijdens het debat werd er stilgestaan bij zowel de postieve als negatieve implicaties van de macht van Facebook.

Het panel werd aan de hand van een vijftal stellingen uitgenodigd hun mening te geven.

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Today British new media critic Andrew Keen gave a lecture about his new book ‘Digital Vertigo’ at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. The book is all build around Hitchcock’s movie ‘Vertigo’ in which the main character falls in love with a woman that does not really exist. This is comparable to web 3.0 argues Keen: ‘it is making us dizzy and will result in us falling in love with something that does not really exist. It is a trick’.

The Cult of the Amateur

Before he goes any further, the author gives a short summary of his previous book ‘The Cult of the Amateur’. This book was published in 2007: the time of web 2.0. Keen criticizes of the rise of the amateur as producer of content in this book.

At the time of web 1.0, Andrew Keen was an Internet entrepreneur. He spend most of the 1990’s in putting high quality content on the internet and founded Audio Café, an attempt to put quality music on the Internet. He saw web 1.0 as a publication platform. ‘Amazon, Craig and other platforms founded at that time are all about publishing quality content. It was rather like the old publishing business’ says Andrew Keen.

Then web 2.0 came along and it became pretty easy to put content on the Internet. Web technologists developed products that allowed anyone to publish and we all became publishers, with the help of YouTube, blogging software and other new technology. ‘There are no librarians sitting in the Google search engine. It is an (supposedly) intelligent devise to define what we see online. My critique was a cultural one: user generated content is of lower quality than professional. People claim I am an elitist, and I agree. In the ‘Cult of the Amateur’ I am very critical about the free culture on the Internet because it makes it very hard for artist to make a living’ says Andrew Keen.

Digital Vertigo

Something has changed since then: we moved from web 2.0 to web 3.0. ‘They have been talking about it for a while. The difference is not really clear between the two, but there is a fundamental shift going on from an economy of links to an economy of likes’ says Andrew Keen. Web 2.0 tended to be anonymous; web 3.0 is far less anonymous and is significantly defined by Facebook. It is becoming more social.

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[schedule proposal]

The participation to the The Global Square at Berlin Biennale is divided in two types of activity: Nodes (contents) and Actions.

Nodes are:

1.- TGS
Starting date: 27 April
Presence: 2 months

TheGlobalSquare is a decentralized social and organizational environment which respects privacy and transparency for individuals, public organizations and actions. TheGlobalSquare will consist of P2P user profiles which allow communication through a variety of social mediums. This will enable global networking between local assemblies, task groups and events. TheGlobalSquare will work to create secure global
communications infrastructure and hardware to make such services widely available.

Tribler
Lorea
Diaspora
call4developers

2.- P2P
Starting date: 7 May
Presence: 1 week

Entirely distributed networks are the proven way to a truly free network, based on cooperation among peers to define tasks, commons and goods. This allows for the establishment of an automomous decision-making process throughout the network.

p2pfoundation
Tribler
Bitcoin
Freenet

3.- Social networks
Starting date: 14 May
Presence: 1 week

Corporate social networks are the main tools that have been used during 2011 by Occupy and similar movements worldwide. These social networks have become essential to spread movement ideals and to coordinate direct actions. However, utilizing corporate social media is a risky option concerning freedom, privacy, transparency. We will introduce existing self-organized social networks that are based on free software
philosophy and commons principles.

Lorea
Diaspora
Social Swarm
Briar
Sukey

4.- Privacy
Starting date: 21 May
Presence: 1 week

Why are we still communicating through unsecure corporate-owned systems such as Gmail, Skype and Facebook? During these last months we’ve seen the importance of privacy and anonymity in #revolutions taking place in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia, where unsecure dissemination puts one’s life at a risk. We are also seeing many new corporate “privacy” policies and government laws that allow user data to be easily handed to third parties with little to no consideration for the user’s rights or personal safety.

Telecomix
Secushare

5.- Free culture / hacktivism
Starting date: 28 May
Presence: 1 week

The so-called “entertainment industry” is pressuring for laws that restrict access to culture and impose censorship. This violates our universal human right of free access to information and knowledge. We shall have a debate about the implications and current status of Internet laws such as ACTA, HADOPI, SINDEWERT, SOPA, PIPA, CISPA. We will also define future global strategies and campaigns to fight against restrictions of free information access.

La quadrature
FCF
hacktivistas.net

6.- Economy of the commons
Starting date: 4 June
Presence: 1 week

Governments call it a crisis, but it’s actually the end of an unecessarily destructive financial system. Other initiatives are already being put into practice that directly connect peers. An economy of the commons is now possible, where people manage the economy collaboratively, and where money is just a tool of facilitation.

Bitcoin
Flattr
Kraut
Goteo
German currency projects

7.- Open hardware / robotics
Starting date: 11 June
Presence: 1 week

Generally we talk about free software, but hardware also must become free so that we are no longer dependent upon corporations to produce patented products. In a world where much work can be automatized, we can begin to consider the possibility of a distributed robotic network. Such a system could avoid planned obsolescence and allow the world far greater sustainability.

8.- Social Media
Starting date: 18 June
Presence: 1 week

During year 2011, the #revolution has enhanced the importance of social media. The intensive use of social networks as communication tools means that anyone can become a journalist, that the people have become the media. We can now spread the message of our actions to the world, showing what is happening in each #revolution despite being ignored and misreported on by corporate media.

DATES: End in June so that we may coincide with Brazil livemedia forum and connect via stream with them

Indymedia
occupy comm teams
Wikileaks central
Altermet
Globalleaks
Mosireen
Adbusters

Conclusions, schedule and future events

The last week of the Biennale will be a time to reflect on the work done, to plan tasks and events, and to establish milestone goals for the near and distant future.

Starting date: 25 June
Presence: 1 week

Actions:
Coordination meeting from #occupy movement tech-teams
Hacking the streets
Hackathons
Install party
Workshops (how to encrypt mail, use a blog, on each of our tools (lorea,
diaspora, etc …)
Talks (what is free software, free culture, ….)
Copystation so people can copy free culture material

U bent uitgenodigd om donderdag 26 april 2012 het debat bij te wonen over ‘De Macht van Facebook – Vriendschap naar de Beurs’ in de Waag Society in Amsterdam.

Het sociale netwerk Facebook is het snelstgroeiende virtuele netwerk wereldwijd. Met de beursgang van Facebook en de publicatie van het boek ‘De macht van Facebook’ van Peter Olsthoorn wordt het tijd dit sociale netwerk eens onder de loep te nemen. Daarom organiseren Peter Olsthoorn, het Instituut voor Netwerk Cultuur en Waag Society op 26 april het debat ‘De macht van Facebook – Vriendschap naar de beurs’. Facebook kent belangrijke positieve kanten: het is een perfect platform voor sociaal verkeer, marketing, identificatie en het is veiliger dan het open internet. Hoe kunnen we hier het best gebruik van maken als internetgemeenschap? Zijn er ook nadelen aan verbonden en zijn die overkomelijk? Deze en vele andere vragen komen aan bod tijdens het debat.

Sprekers zijn onder andere:
- Frank Kresin (research director Waag Society)
- Peter Olsthoorn (auteur ‘De Macht van Facebook’)
- Steven Jongeneel (directeur Social Embassy)
- Antoinette Hoes (Head of Strategy Tribal DDB)
- Karin Spaink (Columniste voor Het Parool en internetfilosoof)

Waar?

Waag Society
Nieuwmarkt 4, Amsterdam

Wanneer?

Donderdag 26 april 2012

Van 16.30 tot 18.30 uur
Na afloop van het debat is er een borrel en kan het boek gekocht worden.

Aanmelden

Aanmelden kan via een e-mail naar rsvp@networkcultures.org

Kijk voor meer informatie ook op events.waag.org

Na De Macht van Google brengt internetjournalist en media expert Peter Olsthoorn nu ook de macht van Facebook voor de lezer in kaart. Dit interview gaat in op een aantal aspecten hiervan, waarbij het concept privacy in relatie tot social media centraal zal staan.

Kunt u iets vertellen over de verschillende onderwerpen die in het boek De Macht van Facebook aan bod komen?

Het boek behandeld verschillende vraagstukken en onderwerpen met betrekking tot Facebook, onderverdeeld in zes delen. Ten eerste de vraag: wat is de macht van Facebook en wat betekent dit voor privacy? Vanaf privacy wordt de sprong gemaakt naar marketing: hoe maakt marketing hier gebruik van. Een gedeelte van het boek is geweid aan terrorisme waar ik bijvoorbeeld inga op Anders Breivik en de aanslag die hij pleegde in Noorwegen. Daarnaast komen ook onderwerpen zoals doodgaan en verslaving aan bod en wordt er dus ingegaan op de maatschappelijke gevolgen van Facebook.Ten slotte komen filosofen, technici en schrijvers aan het woord over hun gedachtes en meningen wat betreft Facebook.

Hoewel privacy wel centraal staat, is het zeker niet het enige onderwerp dat dit boek beslaat. Daarnaast draait het hier niet om modder gooien: Ik heb ervoor gewaakt om echt puur negatief te zijn over Facebook.

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Geert Lovink enthusiastically welcomed everyone at the second Unlike Us conference on the 9th of March 2012 in Trouw Amsterdam. He begins by successfully reminding us why there is reason for us to be critical and ambitious when it comes to understanding the workings of dominant social media platforms, which centralized structures are ruling the Internet and so many of our daily lives.

(Click here for the video of Geert Lovink’s presentation)

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After her inspiring view on society’s non-existence in relation to social media at the Unlike Us #2 conference on the 9th of March 2012, we got the change to ask Jodi Dean some questions to further explore ‘the social’ and the existence of social media platforms in a capitalist society.

(Michelle)  Is building alternatives in social media the right tool for criticizing and resisting dominant social media platforms and hence overcoming the capitalist power structures from which these platforms emerge.

Not exactly correct because they are already in power relations. The point is that if we think about power distribution in concentrated networks; dispersion and centralization are two sides of the same coin. There are hubs and there is the long tail and more and more dispersion will also produce the figurative gap between the dispersed long tail and the one at the top. So this makes it easier to go to the thing that is more popular than it is to find the things that are less popular. I think that a lot of the mentality in building lots of alternatives participates in the dispersion and hence also concentration.

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Hacker, artist and writer Eleanor Saitta started her presentation by tracing quite a bleak scenario of the current global situation. As overpopulation and global warming expose the limits of the human presence on Earth, financial capitalism appropriates sociality, under the disguise of normal companies like Facebook. States try and keep their controlling position, while at the same time adjusting to the world-wide flows that transcend them, thus paving the way for a “preventable geocide.”

As a designer and an activist, Saitta is now currently working on two main projects in order to bridge the technical literacy that social media have spread across society with the political commitment it takes to try and turn things around.

(Click here for the video of Eleanor Saitta’s presentation)
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