Proposal for a research network, a series of events and a reader

Concept: Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures/HvA, Amsterdam) and Korinna Patelis (Cyprus University of Technology, Lemasol)

Summary

The aim of this proposal is to establish a research network of artists, designers, scholars, activists and programmers who work on 'alternatives in social media'. Through workshops, conferences, online dialogues and publications, Unlike Us intends to both analyze the economic and cultural aspects of dominant social media platforms and to propagate the further development and proliferation of alternative, decentralized social media software.

If you want to join the Unlike Us network, start your own initiatives in this field or hook up what you have already been doing for ages, subscribe to the email list. Traffic will be modest. Soon there will be a special page/blog for the initiative on the INC website. Also an independent social network will be installed shortly, using alternative software.

More on that later! List info: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/unlike-us_listcultures.org

Background

Whether or not we are in the midst of internet bubble 2.0, we can all agree that social media dominate internet and mobile use. The emergence of web-based user to user services, driven by an explosion of informal dialogues, continuous uploads and user generated content have greatly empowered the rise of participatory culture. At the same time, monopoly power, commercialization and commodification are also on the rise with just a handful of social media platforms dominating the social web. These two contradictory processes – both the facilitation of free exchanges and the commercial exploitation of social relationships – seem to lie at the heart of contemporary capitalism. On the one hand new media create and expand the social spaces through which we interact, play and even politicize ourselves; on the other hand they are literally owned by three or four companies that have phenomenal power to shape such interaction. Whereas the hegemonic Internet ideology promises open, decentralized systems, why do we, time and again, find ourselves locked into closed corporate environments? Why are individual users so easily charmed by these 'walled gardens'? Do we understand the long-term costs that society will pay for the ease of use and simple interfaces of their beloved 'free' services?

The accelerated growth and scope of Facebook’s social space, for example, is unheard of. Facebook claims to have 700 million users, ranks in the top two or three first destination sites on the Web worldwide and is valued at 50 billion US dollars. Its users willingly deposit a myriad of snippets of their social life and relationships on a site that invests in an accelerated play of sharing and exchanging information. We all befriend, rank, recommend, create circles, upload photos, videos and update our status. A myriad of (mobile) applications orchestrate this offer of private moments in a virtual public, seamlessly embedding the online world in users’ everyday life.

Yet despite its massive user base, the phenomena of online social networking remains fragile. Just think of the fate of the majority of social networking sites. Who has ever heard of Friendster? The death of Myspace has been looming on the horizon for quite some time. The disappearance of Twitter and Facebook – and Google, for that matter – is only a masterpiece of software away. This means that the protocological future is not stationary but allows space for us to carve out a variety of techno-political interventions. Unlike Us is developed in the spirit of RSS-inventor and uberblogger Dave Winer whose recent Blork project is presented as an alternative for ‘corporate blogging silos’. But instead of repeating the entrepreneurial-start-up-transforming-into-corporate-behemoth formula, isn't it time to reinvent the internet as a truly independent public infrastructure that can effectively defend itself against corporate domination and state control?

Agenda

Going beyond the culture of complaint about our ignorance and loss of privacy, the proposed network of artists, scholars, activists and media folks will ask fundamental and overarching questions about how to tackle these fast-emerging monopoly powers. Situated within the existing oligopoly of ownership and use, this inquiry will include the support of software alternatives and related artistic practices and the development of a common alternative vision of how the techno-social world might be mediated.

Without falling into the romantic trap of some harmonious offline life, Unlike Us asks what sort of network architectures could be designed that contribute to ‘the common’, understood as a shared resource and system of collective production that supports new forms of social organizations (such as organized networks) without mining for data to sell. What aesthetic tactics could effectively end the expropriation of subjective and private dimensions that we experience daily in social networks? Why do we ignore networks that refuse the (hyper)growth model and instead seek to strengthen forms of free cooperation? Turning the tables, let's code and develop other 'network cultures' whose protocols are no longer related to the logic of 'weak ties'. What type of social relations do we want to foster and discover in the 21^st century? Imagine dense, diverse networked exchanges between billions of people, outside corporate and state control. Imagine discourses returning subjectivities to their 'natural' status as open nodes based on dialogue and an ethics of free exchange.

To a large degree social media research is still dominated by quantitative and social scientific endeavors. So far the focus has been on moral panics, privacy and security, identity theft, self-representation from Goffman to Foucault and graph-based network theory that focuses on influencers and (news) hubs. What is curiously missing from the discourse is a rigorous discussion of the political economy of these social media monopolies. There is also a substantial research gap in understanding the power relations between the social and the technical in what are essentially software systems and platforms. With this initiative, we want to shift focus away from the obsession with youth and usage to the economic, political, artistic and technical aspects of these online platforms. What we first need to acknowledge is social media's double nature. Dismissing social media as neutral platforms with no power is as implausible as considering social media the bad boys of capitalism. The beauty and depth of social media is that they call for a new understanding of classic dichotomies such as commercial/political, private/public, users/producers, artistic/standardised, original/copy, democratising/ disempowering. Instead of taking these dichotomies as a point of departure, we want to scrutinise the social networking logic. Even if Twitter and Facebook implode overnight, the social networking logic of befriending, liking and ranking will further spread across all aspects of life.

The proposed research agenda is at once a philosophical, epistemological and theoretical investigation of knowledge artifacts, cultural production and social relations and an empirical investigation of the specific phenomenon of monopoly social media. Methodologically we will use the lessons learned from theoretical research activities to inform practice-oriented research, and vice-versa. Unlike Us is a common initiative of the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam University of Applied Science HvA) and the Cyprus University of Technology in Lemasol.

An online network and a reader connected to a series of events initially in Amsterdam and Cyprus (early 2012) are already in planning. We would explicitly like to invite other partners to come on board who identify with the spirit of this proposal, to organize related conferences, festivals, workshops, temporary media labs and barcamps (where coders come together) with us. The reader (tentatively planned as number 8 in the Reader series published by the INC) will be produced mid-late 2012. The call for contributions to the network, the reader and the event series goes out in July 2011, followed by the publicity for the first events and other initiatives by possible new partners.

Topics of Investigation

The events, online platform, reader and other outlets may include the following topics inviting theoretical, empirical, practical and art-based contributions, though not every event or publication might deal with all issues. We anticipate the need for specialized workshops and barcamps.

1. Political Economy: Social Media Monopolies

Social media culture is belied in American corporate capitalism, dominated by the logic of start-ups and venture capital, management buyouts, IPOs etc. Three to four companies literally own the Western social media landscape and capitalize on the content produced by millions of people around the world. One thing is evident about the market structure of social media: one-to-many is not giving way to many-to-many without first going through many-to-one. What power do these companies actually have? Is there any evidence that such ownership influences user-generated content? How does this ownership express itself structurally and in technical terms? What conflicts arise when a platform like Facebook is appropriated for public or political purposes, while access to the medium can easily be denied by the company? Facebook is worth billions, does that really mean something for the average user? How does data-mining work and what is its economy? What is the role of discourse (PR) in creating and sustaining an image of credibility and trustworthiness, and in which forms does it manifest to oppose that image? The bigger social media platforms form central nodes, such as image upload services and short ulr services. This ecology was once fairly open, with a variety of new Twitter-related services coming into being, but now Twitter takes up these services itself, favoring their own product through default settings; on top of that it is increasingly shutting down access to developers, which shrinks the ecology and makes it less diverse.

2. The Private in the Public

The advent of social media has eroded privacy as we know it, giving rise to a culture of self-surveillance made up of myriad voluntary, everyday disclosures. New understandings of private and public are needed to address this phenomenon. What does owning all this user data actually mean? Why are people willing to give up their personal data, and that of others? How should software platforms be regulated? Is software like a movie to be given parental guidance? What does it mean that there are different levels of access to data, from partner info brokers and third-party developers to the users? Why is education in social media not in the curriculum of secondary schools? Can social media companies truly adopt a Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights?

3. Visiting the Belly of the Beast

The exuberance and joy that defined the dotcom era is cliché by now. IT use is occurring across the board, and new labour conditions can be found everywhere. But this should not keep our eyes away from the power relations inside internet companies. What are the geopolitical lines of distribution that define the organization and outsourcing taking place in global IT companies these days? How is the industry structured and how does its economy work? Is there a broader connection to be made with the politics of land expropriation and peasant labour in countries like India, for instance, and how does this analytically converge with the experiences of social media users? How do monopolies deal with their employees’ use of the platforms? What can we learn from other market sectors and perspectives that (critically) reflect on, for example, techniques of sustainability or fair trade?

4. Artistic Responses to Social Media

Artists are playing a crucial role in visualizing power relationships and disrupting subliminal daily routines of social media usage. Artistic practice provides an important analytical site in the context of the proposed research agenda, as artists are often first to deconstruct the familiar and to facilitate an alternative lens to understand and critique these media. Is there such a thing as a social 'web aesthetics'? It is one thing to criticize Twitter and Facebook for their primitive and bland interface designs. How can we imagine the social in different ways? And how can we design and implement new interfaces to provide more creative freedom to cater to our multiple identities? Also, what is the scope of interventions with social media, such as, for example, the ‘dislike button’ add-on for Facebook? And what practices are really needed? Isn’t it time, for example, for a Facebook ‘identity correction’?

5. Designing culture: representation and software

Social media offer us the virtual worlds we use every day. From Facebook's 'like' button to blogs’ user interface, these tools empower and delimit our interactions. How do we theorize the plethora of social media features? Are they to be understood as mere technical functions, cultural texts, signifiers, affordances, or all these at once? In what ways do design and functionalities influence the content and expressions produced? And how can we map and critique this influence? What are the cultural assumptions embedded in the design of social media sites and what type of users or communities do they produce? To answer the question of structure and design, one route is to trace the genealogy of functionalities, to historicize them and look for discursive silences. How can we make sense of the constant changes occurring both on and beyond the interface? How can we theorize the production and configuration of an ever-increasing algorithmic and protocological culture more generally?

6. Software Matters: Sociotechnical and Algorithmic Cultures

One of the important components of social media is software. For all the discourse on sociopolitical power relations governed by corporations such as Facebook and related platforms, one must not forget that social media platforms are thoroughly defined and powered by software. We need critical engagement with Facebook as software. That is, what is the role of software in reconfiguring contemporary social spaces? In what ways does code make a difference in how identities are formed and social relationships performed? How does the software function to interpellate users to its logic? What are the discourses surrounding software? One of the core features of Facebook for instance is its news feed, which is algorithmically driven and sorted in its default mode. The EdgeRank algorithm of the news feed governs the logic by which content becomes visible, acting as a modern gatekeeper and editorial voice. Given its 700 million users, it has become imperative to understand the power of EdgeRank and its cultural implications. Another important analytical site for investigation are the ‘application programming interfaces’ (APIs) that to a large extent made the phenomenal growth of social media platforms possible in the first place. How have APIs contributed to the business logic of social media? How can we theorize social media use from the perspective of the programmer?

6. Genealogies of Social Networking Sites

Feedback in a closed system is a core characteristic of Facebook; even the most basic and important features, such as 'friending', traces back to early cybernetics' ideas of control. While the word itself became lost in various transitions, the ideas of cybernetics have remained stable in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics and the biopolitical arena. Both communication and information theories shaped this discourse. How does Facebook relate to such an algorithmic shape of social life? What can Facebook teach us about the powers of systems theory? Would Norbert Wiener and Niklas Luhmann be friends on Facebook?

7. Is Research Doomed?

The design of Facebook excludes the third person perspective, as the only way in is through ones own profile. What does this inbuilt ‘me-centricity’ imply for social media research? Does it require us to rethink the so-called objectivity of researchers and the detached view of current social research? Why is it that there are more than 200 papers about the way people use Facebook, but the site is ‘closed’ to true quantitative inquiry? Is the state of art in social media research exemplary of the 'quantitative turn' in new media research? Or is there a need to expand and rethink methods of inquiry in social media research? Going beyond the usual methodological approaches of the quantitative and qualitative, we seek to broaden the scope of investigating these media. How can we make sense of the political economy and the socio-technical elements, and with what means? Indeed, what are our toolkits for collective, transdisciplinary modes of knowledge and the politics of refusal?

8. Researching Unstable Ontologies

Software destabilizes Facebook as a solid ontology. Software is always in becoming and so by nature ontogenetic. It grows and grows, living off of constant input. Logging on one never encounters the same content, as it changes on an algorithmic level and in terms of the platform itself. What does Facebook’s fluid nature imply for how we make sense of and study it? Facebook for instance willingly complicates research: 1. It is always personalized (see Eli Pariser). Even when creating ‘empty’ research accounts it never gives the same results compared to other people’s empty research accounts. 2. One must often be 'inside' social media to study it. Access from the outside is limited, which reinforces the first problem. 3. Outside access is ideally (for Facebook and Twitter) arranged through carefully regulated protocols of APIs and can easily be restricted. Next to social media as a problem for research, there is also the question of social research methods as intervention.

9. Making Sense of Data: Visualization and Critique

Data representation is one of the most important battlefields nowadays. Indeed, global corporations build their visions of the world increasingly based on and structured around complex data flows. What is the role of data today and what are the appropriate ways in which to make sense of the burgeoning datasets? As data visualization is becoming a powerful buzzword and social research increasingly uses digital tools to make ‘beautiful’ graphs and visualizations, there is a need to take a step back and question the usefulness of current data visualization tools and to develop novel analytical frameworks through which to critically grasp these often simplified and nontransparent ways of representing data. Not only is it important to develop new interpretative and visual methods to engage with data flows, data itself needs to be questioned. We need to ask about data’s ontological and epistemological nature. What is it, who is the producer, for whom, where is it stored? In what ways do social media companies’ terms of service regulate data? Whether alternative social media or monopolistic platforms, how are our data-bodies exactly affected by changes in the software?

10. Pitfalls of Building Social Media Alternatives

It is not only important to critique and question existing design and socio-political realities but also to engage with possible futures. The central aim of this project is therefore to contribute and support 'alternatives in social media'. What would the collective design of alternative protocols and interfaces look like? We should find some comfort in the small explosion of alternative options currently available, but also ask how usable these options are and how real is the danger of fragmentation. How have developers from different initiatives so far collaborated and what might we learn from their successes and failures? Understanding any early failures and successes of these attempts seems crucial. A related issue concerns funding difficulties faced by projects. Finally, in what ways does regionalism (United States, Europe, Asia) feed into the way people search for alternatives and use social media.

11. Showcasing Alternatives in Social Media

The best way to criticize platform monopolies is to support alternative free and open source software that can be locally installed. There are currently a multitude of decentralized social networks in the making that aspire to facilitate users with greater power to define for themselves with whom share their data. Let us look into the wildly different initiatives from Crabgrass, Appleseed, Diaspora, NoseRub, BuddyCloud, Protonet, StatusNet, GNU Social, Lorea and OneSocialWeb to the distributed Twitter alternative Thimbl. In which settings are these initiative developed and what choices are made for their design? Let's hear from the Spanish activists who have recently made experiences with the n-1.cc platform developed by Lorea. What community does this platform enable? While traditional software focuses on the individual profile and its relation to the network and a public (share with friends, share with friends of friends, share with public), the Lorea software for instance asks you with whom to share an update, picture or video. It finegrains the idea of privacy and sharing settings at the content level, not the user’s profile. At the same time, it requires constant decision making, or else a high level of trust in the community you share your data with. And how do we experience the transition from, or interoperability with, other platforms? Is it useful to make a distinction between corporate competitors and grassroots initiatives? How can these beta alternatives best be supported, both economically and socially? Aren't we overstating the importance of software and isn't the availability of capital much bigger in determining the adoption of a platform?

12. Social Media Activism and the Critique of Liberation Technology

While the tendency to label any emergent social movement as the latest 'Twitter revolution' has passed, a liberal discourse of 'liberation technology' (information and communication technologies that empower grassroots movements) continues to influence our ideas about networked participation. This discourse tends to obscure power relations and obstruct critical questioning about the capitalist institutions and superstructures in which these technologies operate. What are the assumptions behind this neo-liberal discourse? What role do ‘developed’ nations play when they promote and subsidize the development of technologies of circumvention and hacktivism for use in ‘underdeveloped’ states, while at the same time allowing social media companies at home to operate in increasingly deregulated environments and collaborating with them in the surveillance of citizens at home and abroad? What role do companies play in determining how their products are used by dissidents or governments abroad? How have their policies and Terms of Use changed as a result?

13. Social Media in the Middle East and Beyond

The justified response to downplay the role of Facebook in early 2011 events in Tunisia and Egypt by putting social media in a larger perspective has not taken off the table the question of how to organize social mobilizations. Which specific software do the 'movements of squares' need? What happens to social movements when the internet and ICT networks are shut down? How does the interruption of internet services shift the nature of activism? How have repressive and democratic governments responded to the use of ‘liberation technologies’? How do these technologies change the relationship between the state and its citizens? How are governments using the same social media tools for surveillance and propaganda or highjacking Facebook identities, such as happened in Syria? What is Facebook’s own policy when deleting or censoring accounts of its users? How can technical infrastructures be supported which are not shutdown upon request? How much does our agency depend on communication technology nowadays? And whom do we exclude with every click? How can we envision 'organized networks' that are based on 'strong ties' yet open enough to grow quickly if the time is right? Which software platforms are best suited for the 'tactical camping' movements that occupy squares all over the world?

14. Data storage: social media and legal cultures

Data that is voluntarily shared by social media users is not only used for commercial purposes, but is also of interest to governments. This data is stored on servers of companies that are bound to the specific legal culture and country. This material-legal complex is often overlooked. Fore instance, the servers of Facebook and Twitter are located in the US and therefore fall under the US jurisdiction. One famous example is the request for the Twitter accounts of several activists (Gonggrijp, Jónsdóttir, Applebaum) affiliated with Wikileaks projects by the US government. How do activists respond and how do alternative social media platforms deal with this issue?

For more information please contact: Geert Lovink (geert[at]xs4all[dot]nl) or Korinna Patelis (korinna.patelis[at]cut[dot]ac[dot]cy)

Thanks to Marc Stumpel, Sabine Niederer, Vito Campanelli, Ned Rossiter, Michael Dieter, Oliver Leistert, Taina Bucher, Gabriella Coleman, Ulises Mejias, Anne Helmond, Lonneke van der Velden, Morgan Currie, Silvio Lorusso and Eric Kluitenberg for their input.

VV summer school is organized by Dan Oki and Dalibor Martinis.

Split, 07.07.2011

We would like to invite you and your students to participate in the Video Vortex summer school Vis, 2011. This is the first year that school is being organized as part of the international Video Vortex network. The aim of the project is to establish a European summer school and future joint study programs in the fields of film, media arts, performance and cultural theory.

As a bit of background, the island of Vis and the town of Komiza have a very particular location within both the Croatian geographical and historical context and within the wider Mediterranean cultural-historical environment. Vis and Komiza have witnessed prehistoric times, the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, the 19th century struggles of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy and England for the domination of the Adriatic, the wave of emigration from the island to America at the beginning of the 20th century, a free territory with Tito's cave of 1944, and they have become an internationally renowned contemporary tourist destination. All the while, Vis and Komiza have been both the periphery and the center of Mediterranean and Croatian culture. Despite having a small number of inhabitants, a small surface area and being geographically isolated, Komiza is an urbanized place featuring a pronounced linguistic, cultural, economic and social identity. Based on these traits of Komiza and Vis, it is possible to develop a new symbolic value. The constant simultaneity of local and global can be found in new media practices as they establish new simultaneities (inside/outside, aesthetic/ethic, body/virtual...), and a paradigm of the net-work and/or the archipelago annuls the dichotomy between center and periphery. Summer school will rely on the already articulated inter-island cultural practices which have been, in this part of the Adriatic, developed by local cultural activists under the name of Moj otoče (My Island). The marine area surrounding Vis is many times greater than the area of the island and thus the sea (as a space which both isolates and at the same time connects, as a mythical place, as an economic resource and as a point of disappearing on one side and a life-sustaining medium on the other) can be seen as a parallel space of media research.

We will have the following teachers from six respected universities at this first Video Vortex summer school which will happen on the island of Vis in the town of Komiza between the 22nd and the 31st of August, 2011.

Sarah Kesenne – Sint Lucas Art Academy of Gent, Belgium

Kobe Vermeere – Sint Lucas Art Academy of Gent, Belgium

Merry Krell – Sussex University of Brighton, School of Media, Film and Music, UK

Adrian Goycoolea - Sussex University of Brighton, School of Media, Film and Music, UK

Peter Purg – University of Nova Gorizia, School of Arts, Slovenia

Davor Svaic – University of Zagreb, Academy of Dramatic Arts, Croatia

Dalibor Martinis – University of Rijeka, Academy of Aplied Arts, Croatia

Sandra Sterle – University of Split, Academy of Arts, Croatia

Dan Oki – University of Split, Academy of Arts,  Croatia

Dinko Bozanic – University of Split, Academy of Arts, Croatia

Brian Willems – University of Split, Faculty of Philosophy, Croatia

Besides university teachers we will have also two other teaching participants:

Srećko Horvat – theoretician

Vjeran Šalamon – music composer and sound designer

We expect to have 2-4 students from each university. All together, around 20 students and 10 teachers are expected. The invited teachers should select some of their students to participate in the workshop. Structure of the workshop is that students work in couple of groups. For example, one group will be working in the field as a mobile film-media crew and another group will be assembling and editing materials and/or putting it online. Other groups or individuals can develop their own work methods or they can work exclusively with online moving image. There will also be a small film set and the production of a couple of scenes for a feature film will be taking place. We will have underwater cameras and motion capture control, lighting and sound equipment. For students who want to work on themes related to the island of Vis, here are a couple of possible themes:

- The Island of Vis and its Marine Area – Tradition

- My Island

- Global/Local – History

- Tito's Cave – Vis 1944

Each day there will be a conceptual round table centered on planning the next day of production. Each evening we will also have one presentation or lecture by one of the teachers.

At the end of the workshop we will have presentations in the local cinema and on about 10 plasma televisions placed around the town of Komiza.

We will cover accommodation, breakfast and dinner for you as a teacher. The accommodation is in a two-star hotel, but on such a remote island it counts for four stars in the summer. The name of the hotel is called Bisevo, in the town of Komiza, the island of Vis. Please check it out on the web.

For students we have discount rates at the hotel. They have to pay 200 kunas per day, which includes accommodation, breakfast and dinner. It is, with taxes, around 30 Euros per day. The idea is to have workshops for 10 days and 9 nights. So for each student it comes to around 270 Euros, or 2,800.00 kunas.

In order to have a balance between students and teachers, the teachers do not get a teaching fee but have their accommodation and food covered, while the students do not pay a workshop fee but they have to pay for a discounted accommodation. Both students and teachers have to ask their respected Universities to pay for their travel expenses.

Besides the actual workshop, we will discuss plans for future joint study programs on the European level. Next year we expect more institutions to join us: the Academy of Fine Arts Budapest - Hungary, the Institute of Network Cultures from Amsterdam - the Netherlands and the Academy of Fine Arts from Bruinschweig – Germany, and other interested parties. A new edition of the Video Vortex conference will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in may 2012. It will be a next meeting point for further development of the projects.

Sincerely yours,

Professors Dan Oki and Dalibor Martinis

JessyCom (working title)

The JessyCom project will continue the Miscommunication Technologies series of works, following Miss Information, deadSwap, YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME!?, and Thimbl.

Miscommunication Technologies is an ongoing project by Dmytri Kleiner in collaboration with the Telekommunisten Network. Dmytri also wrote the book Telekommunist Manifesto in collaboration with INC. Miscommunication Technologies employ satire and emphasize simplicity and human interactions over technological sophistication, creating platforms that don't often work as expected, or work in unexpected ways. Miscommunication Technologies uncover the social relations embedded in network topologies and communications platforms.

During his residency at the Digital Art Center, Dmytri will give a presentation on the Telekommunist Manifesto, which discusses the Political Economy of networks and information. The manifesto outlines many ideas that are core to the practice of the Telekommunisten Network. Dmytri will also introduce Thimbl, deadSwap and other Telekommunisten projects.

The main focus of the residency will the development of jessyCom. With the help of Tsila Hassine and the Israeli Center for Digital Art Center, a storefront in the Jessy Cohen neighborhood will be converted into a kiosk that resembles those used to market mobile telephone service, but instead will promote "JessyCom" a platform where users can "Share Messages and Win Prizes."  The Jessy Cohen neighbourhood is an underprivileged neighbourhood, many neighbourhood people, especially youth, have mobile phones, but most have no credit, so they can receive calls, but not make any.

When JessyCom receives a phone call, it automatically connects the caller to a randomly selected person that has signed-up for JessyCom, the caller can then pass on a message to this person. Starting from these two people, JessyCom is an implementation of the "random phone call" model of network broadcasting. Information is passed by word of mouth throughout an entire network byway of a series of calls between randomly selected people.

The original message is passed vocally from person to person in a "broken telephone" style until every person in the group has received the message. Other than the original caller, nobody else needs to have any phone credit to participate, as all random calls are initiated by the JessyCom telephone switch and thus are incoming calls for the participants.

To build interest in JessyCom the project will focus around a contest. People will be encouraged to sign-up for JessyCom for the chance to win free top-up cards to get credit for their existing mobile operator. The contest will employ the system to spread special messages into the community, and then award prizes of phone credit to randomly selected community members who know the original message.
Explaining this contest will be the primary role of the storefront, website and other materials. We hope that the contest will incentivize members of the community to join. Once they know how the system works by joining the contest, they can initiate new messages own and employ JessyCom as they like.

Unlike typical social networks, where communication is self-selected into circles of "friends," JessyCom works byway of co-operation of randomly selected people. The "random phone call" broadcast model will connect random people. Users of different ages, with different ethnic and economic backgrounds will need to talk to each and work together for the communication platform to work.

With a bit of co-operation, JessyCom allows one phone call to reach an entire community.

http://www.digitalartlab.org.il/Index.asp

Networks Without a Cause, A Critique of Social Media by Geert Lovink (forthcoming January 2012)

BOOK

Author: Geert Lovink
Publisher: Polity Press 2012
Design: Studio Leon Loes

With the vast majority of Facebook users caught in a frenzy of friending’, ‘liking’ and ‘commenting’, at what point do we pause to grasp the consequences of our info-saturated lives? What compels us to engage so diligently with social networking systems? Networks Without a Cause examines our collective obsession with identity and self-management coupled with the fragmentation and information overload endemic to contemporary online culture.

With a dearth of theory on the social and cultural ramifications of hugely popular online services, Lovink provides a path- breaking critical analysis of our over-hyped, networked world with case studies on search engines, online video, blogging, digital radio, media activism and the WikiLeaks saga. This book offers a powerful message to media practitioners and theorists: let us collectively unleash our critical capacities to influence technology design and workspaces, otherwise we will disappear into the cloud. Probing but never pessimistic, Lovink draws from his long history in media research to offer a critique of the political structures and conceptual powers embedded in the technologies that shape our daily lives.

VIDEOS

Geert Lovink discusses his book: Networks Without a Cause
Videos: produced by Linda Wallace and shot & camera and editing by Emile Zile
Interviewer: Morgan Currie

Critique of Social Media

Most participatory platforms emphasize a model of weak links (think 'friends of friends') that attract a community just to 'hang out', conveniently for the corporations that exploit our social relationships. Organized networks should be seen in opposition to these social sites and are based on people joining together for a common purpose, building strong-ties among dispersed people, and bringing goal-driven organizing to the internet.
Networks Without a Cause employs net criticism to produce new concepts such as org nets that can scale up out of the blue and bring transformations in the vein of the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt.

Politics of Wikileaks

Wikileaks is an example of a critical concept that blows up from the confinements of web 2.0 and participatory culture. There's no wiki involved, users are not redacting documents. What's interesting isn't Wikileaks itself but how it facilitates whistle blowers to give up sensitive documents online. The big shift is tightened security online, but also more projects that use software and digital media to create a powerful, disruptive phenomena.

Aesthetics of Online Video

Online video provides a social, mobile way of watching, and its database structure can be seen as allowing a proactive audience. But what are the constraints of YouTube, and what alternative platforms of online watching could we see moving ahead?

Society of the Query: From Link to Like

How can we make the politics of the algorithm and culture of search more transparent? How is search influencing our lives? The tremendous switch from learning and memorizing to searching changes our relationship to knowledge. What would alternative search engines look like, and what ethics could they reproduce? How are social network's recommendation engines (do you 'like' my song?) treading into the territory of search?

Anonymity, Facebook and Information Overload

Today our intense cultivation of a singular self is tied up in the drive to constantly produce and update. The image is one of a safe intimate space, but what are the new risks for users as political actors and producers of exploitable data? What possible responses could we have to these online identity traps - should we leave altogether or return to new cultures of anonymity as creative or subversive play?
Also how should we respond to the pressure for constant, real-time presence? We could exercise self-mastery of our devices and promote smart design as we integrate them into our lives.

Principles of Net Criticism

Contemporary critics too often comment from the sidelines. Networks Without a Cause by Geert Lovink (Polity 2012) instead sees criticism as productive for its capacity to develop alternative concepts that can be implemented in design - for this reason the critic's relationship with coders and artists is important. Yet how do these fluid ideas take hold and scale up? How do theorists keep their ideas relevant in the so-called age of hyperspeed? Net criticism responds this fundamental issue by claiming that we should not only theorize about our state, but actively steer it - moving beyond the outsiders perspective towards real strategies of collaboration and cooperation.

Geert Lovink at the launch of Theory on Demand books #1 through #4

Margreet Riphagen is the Institute of Network Culture's project manager and the editor of the Theory on Demand book series. Here she explains TOD project's background and how it operates as action-oriented research - and also proof the exploding possibilities for publishing today.

Can you explain the ‘On Demand’ part of the Theory On Demand project?
We decided to begin Theory on Demand because people so often request books from INC, but we’re unable to charge for them. HvA (Hogeschool van Amsterdam, INC’s affiliated institution) has a complex financial system, making it too complicated for us to profit from book selling, and invoicing for a book costs more in terms of human labor than we’d earn by selling it at cost. If you ask ten euros plus shipping for a book, you have to handle enormous amounts of paperwork and accounting through a slow, central financial department.

So instead of shipping print books from INC’s Amsterdam office, we’re making our books available online as a PDF, so people can order a printed copy online and get the books shipped within their own country. We put the entire INC collection on Lulu and Open Mute, and on our website people can also download PDFs. In this way books that aren’t in stock anymore can still be downloaded and ordered.

Lulu’s services are still not very common, and people aren’t yet aware of possibilities of print on demand. But we’re anticipating that this will change soon. We also think we can begin meeting a demand for authors who have a lot of articles to publish and want to explore collecting them into a longer format. Geert came up with the idea that TOD would give authors the possibility to collect all their articles together for publication, especially since it’s hard to find a print publisher to do this.

Why do some of your authors have a hard time publishing with a traditional print press?
These are really specific topics that aren’t for a mainstream, wide audience. Also, an article by itself may not get any notice, but we can work with editors to make compilations. For example, we have a book about the Turkish perspective on new media in a collection of 20 authors. In the end it’s a nice book but individually they might have a hard time publishing their work.

Also, we’re here in case authors want to do reissues. With issue six, Tom Apperley [Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated Global], it was published before, but the publisher didn’t want to print a second addition. So we got permission to publish it again.

How do you select titles? Are you approaching people or do they come to you?
We haven’t had to approach many people; mostly authors come to us. There are three or four possible upcoming titles to publish. Patrick Lichty, Josephine Bosma, Sebastiaan Olma, Fran Ilich and Rasa Smite are scheduled to launch before the end of the year.

So far it’s a bit random. The first two or three Theory on Demand books were from people closely affiliated with INC. The very first is Geert’s PhD thesis [Dynamics of Critical Internet Culture (1994–2001)], and we asked Joost Smiers to publish his book [co-written by Marieke van Schijndel: Imagine there are is no copyright and no cultural conglomorates too…Better for artists, diversity and the economy. an essay]. Geert often finds interesting work, and sometimes with my advice we come to a conclusion to publish something.

The main condition is that the text is finalized with footnotes in one document. It’s more this formal criteria than the content itself that decides if something is ready to be published. We are trying to make helpful and clear guidelines so that people can send texts that fulfill the style guide. We hardly edit right now. We want to do more to prepare manuscripts, but at the moment we don’t have the resources. We ask the authors to send a completed and properly formatted text based on a style guide we’ve created. Then we convert it into a format that a designer made specifically for this series.

Now that people see we’re giving authors a chance to publish, we have a lot of requests to publish books both in English and foreign languages. Currently we’re prioritizing English texts to have it a bit more mainstream and because we are more able to edit these contributions, but in the future we’ll begin issuing different languages.

Geert Lovink and Joost Smiers at the launch of Theory on Demand books #1 through #4

Aside from the INC affiliation, what value does TOD bring to a work that an author may not get by self-publishing?
The jacket design and layout, for one. It’s always nicer to send something beautifully designed than a word doc or PDF, even though it’s the content that matters.

We’re also creating a small, centralized library where a lot of new media theory can come together, and this potentially brings in more traffic. We issue TOD along with other INC publishing series like Network Notebooks and the INC readers, so people can find a lot of interesting information on one website. And we provide the PDF to Lulu so authors don’t have to do it. There’s also an ISBN number for each book added to the central ISBN number collection.

We also do a little bit of promotion, such as book launches if the author is available. With the book we did recently for Andreas Treske on Turkish new media critique [Time and Motion: New Media Critique fromTurkey, Ankara (2003 – 2010)], all the people included will use that PDF to distribute the book among their own network.

Do you see this ever becoming a profitable model?
For academics, universities, and high schools, the books can be useful, but I don’t think it will be profitable on the normal book market because it’s niche. But people who are interested in it are willing to pay a small amount for the books. I conducted a survey and found that with the INC Readers people don’t mind paying 10 or 15 euros for them. I’m not sure how prices will evolve for printed book compared to online PDFs and e-reader formats, but that would be interesting to research.

We want to make nice files for e-readers, which demands a different technical process for a different medium. We could potentially make money from downloading for an e-reader. But also here it is difficult within the current infrastructure of the HvA to gain an income from this.

For me it’s interesting to see where this goes, if we’ll start getting weekly request for authors of their books or authors being published. But we haven’t gotten to that point yet. We applied for some funding to turn our publishing projects into a research program – not only about print on demand, but also the future of ebooks. We can use TOD to gather logistics on why people order certain books.

When we published van Kranenberg’s Internet of Things, for instance, we asked people when they requested the book if they could tell us where they’re living so we could get a geographical picture of where the book were going. I’d really like to get a plug-in that shows were people are living who are downloading the PDF’s. If more people are downloading TOD in western side of world, maybe we should publish something focused on the eastern part. We could map out which topics are hotter in various countries.

So besides experimenting with the new possibilities, we can conduct research on the project. It’s action-based research – doing by practicing.

The publication overview is now available in EPUB format. This release represents an experiment on employing open standards for INC digital publishing.

The catalogue includes INC Reader series, Studies in Network Cultures, Network Notebooks, Theory on Demand and some miscellaneous titles.

Download EPUB from here.

Matthew Stadler has written a detailed day-in-the-life story in Design Observer at his innovative publishing studio...part printing press, part community event project, part hybrid store front business that, here's hoping, may soon become a settled model of what bookmaking could look like.

The entity calls itself modestly Publication Studio, founded by Stadler, former editor of Nest Magazine and publisher of Clear Cut Press, and Patricia No in Portland, OR. What I find so intriguing about their model is that paper book printing seems to draw license and energy from what we normally attribute to digital practices: instant on-demand replication (they have their own hot-glue perfect binder in the store - you can walk in with a thumbdrive and walk out with a fresh book), they like to issue texts composed of nothing more than a clever image mashup pulled from the web like someone's tumblr page, and they mess around with the murky terrain of copyright by reissuing out-of-print works without going through (the often defunct) publisher. When its so easy to hotglue a spine onto a printed-out pdf, printing might be the next hum drum home brewed act of piracy after the torrent download.

Or sort of. Those are debatable statements. Operating a perfect binder is no easy task, and PS has mastered it as a craft. Which is also why their business model works, even if they offer their books online for free: people want the book objects, they have simplicity and style, and they're the embodied effort of something much larger, a dedicated community of book lovers, of books as more than texts.

PS has grown affiliated offshoots in cities like Toronto, LA, which act less like franchises and more like forks thriving in their different contexts. Each 'sibling studio' contributes books and events to the overall catalog and can publish and profit from selling books originated by any other studio. This concept also seems derived more from what today is attributed to digital culture than from older proprietary models: the more that's shared, the more everyone gains.

From Stadler's article:

We make books as a kind of public space; and we extend that space into a digital commons (all our books can be read free and annotated online); we also host the social life of books. Our storefront is the nexus of all of that — home to the social, digital, and physical business of literature.

At the following links you can find all the Theory on Demand readers published till now. In addition, several other readers by the INC are available for browsing and free download. In the next days the catalogue will be updated with the missing documents.

INC's bookshelf on Scribd.

INC's bookshelf on Issuu.

About Scribd: Scribd (pronounced /ˈskrɪbd/) is a Web 2.0 based document-sharing website which allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format. Scribd was founded by Trip Adler in 2006 (from Wikipedia). More informations here.

About Issuu: Issuu is an online service that allows for realistic and customizable viewing of digitally uploaded material, such as portfolios, books, magazine issues, newspapers, and other print media. It integrates with social networking sites to promote uploaded material. Issuu's service is comparable to what Flickr does for photo-sharing, and what YouTube does for video-sharing (from Wikipedia). More informations here.

The Espresso Book Machine allows to print a book in minutes. It's perfect for self-publishing because one can print as many copy as he or she needs. When a book is printed it may be stored in the database so customers from all around the world can buy prints of it. One can also print his own copyright-free Google book, for instance a book which is not printed anymore by the major publishing houses. Read the rest of this entry »

By Sophie Krier
25th of May 2011
http://www.sophie-krier.blogspot.com/

Yesterday I moderated the Book by Design session at the Unbound Book Conference, organised the Institute of Network Cultures. The setting of the session was the book as it evolves today, unbound from its traditional format, content, production and use parameters. New territories are said to emerge for book designers, or rather: designers of reading experiences, in Andrew Blauvelt's words [in: I read Where I am, a collection of statements on new reading and information cultures by Mieke Gerritzen, Geert Lovink and Minke Kampman, released today]. See all images of the conference by Sebastiaan Ter Burg  here.

The Panelists were Dirk van Weelden (author and philosopher), Otmar Hoefen (trained typesetter), Roosje Klap (graphic designer) and Femke Snelting (artist / designer). They addressed the questions of the day from a philosophical angle, from the perspective of the work floor –and the desk top– and from the experience of the act of imagining, and designing (e)books.

Here are some notes I took from the talks and the discussion. I purposely interspersed notes from other sessions of the day to add some spice to the whole notion of bookishness and readership, which by the end of the day literally made me dizzy (and angry also, for no clear reason?!). The phrases are from the four panelists, Nicholas Spice, I Read Where I Am, Henk Oosterling, and myself.

- a book is an object, a medium and an idea

- a book is a valued system that ultimately generates knowledge

- a book is accumulated, immersed attention

- every book (or object) has always had its origin in a network

- books make time; reading literally tele transports you out of here and now

- the types of things we read shape us as readers (down to the 6 point typeface): what kind of readers does the world need?

- texts and image have become interchangeable, we watch text as much as we read images

- we should start thinking about how browsing, leafing, linking and watching can become significant concepts of today's reading cultures

- reading can be informational, performative (as in sheet music), social and/or (!) solitary, to name only but a few. the future of book design is in understanding these modes of reading, and including these affordances in the entire process

- design is about designing interfaces and affordances: the nature of these is becoming more and more complex and dispersed, geographically and over time. book design for a network society needs to happen in a networked way

- how can a WORK retain its value in an information society, when every word that is made public is immediately appropriated, taken out of context, and displaced?

- taking money out of the information chain equation and replacing it with time can generate an entirely different valorization process

- we need to realize that we have the tendency to fetish openness over closure, the social over the solitude, the processual over the finished / the bound item, a hyper narrative  over 'traditional' linearity, and most of all: we fetish real time.

The question that asks to be tried out in as many ways as possible, starting from today is to me:

Can we reinvent writing and reading as a form of resistance to the dominant market driven forces that shape the world of books today?

All this took place, very appropriately, in The Theatre of the Word, on the seventh floor of the thriving, non-library like OBA (Amsterdam's renewed and very popular public library) – a sign that bookishness and readership are as valid today as they were since their invention, when they supplied us with a much needed external memory to store all our accumulated knowledge.

The proof? Books are great suppliers of humour, one of mankind's most vital survival techniques in my opinion… Here's the The 1st volume of “ How to understand women” in pocket version….. (No need to tell you who sent me that, and why ….. :)).