Simona Lodi – Art as Networked Machinery: When Art Becomes Anti-Social for Being More Social

By serenawestra, March 25, 2013

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 [...]

Marion Walton – How Can We Reflect on Mobile Use More Fairly?

By freyjavandenboom, March 25, 2013

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. In South Africa, where Marion Walton is a senior researcher [...]

Nathan Freitas – ‘Checking-In’ for the Greater Good

By Andrew Erlanger, March 25, 2013

How do we best respond to the problems and frustrations coterminous with our widespread adoption of mobile social media? According to Nathan Freitas, the answer may lie in building new solutions or enhancing existing alternative structures. In his lively Unlike Us presentation, the global human rights activist argued that rather than merely scoffing at the [...]

Thomas Boeschoten – Project X Haren: Participation and Mobilization on Facebook

By Stijn Peeters, March 24, 2013

Thomas Boeschoten is a Dutch new media researcher, currently in Utrecht University’s New Media & Digital Culture program and involved with the Utrecht Data School. He was part of a committee that was formed after the 2011 riots in Haren, following a widely distributed announcement of a party there that originated on Facebook. In his [...]

Leighton Evans – Buying and Selling People and Places: The Political Economy of Mobile Social Media

By Stijn Peeters, March 24, 2013

Leighton Evans, a research associate at Cardiff University with a PhD from Swansea University under his belt, is as a researcher chiefly interested in location-based social media services. His article How to Build a Map for Nothing: Immaterial Labor and Location-Based Social Networking dealing with this topic appeared in the Unlike Us Reader, and at [...]

Richard Metzger – Promoted Posts and the Economics of Facebook

By kimberlyrosewaldbillig, March 24, 2013

With the presentation of a Skype interview, moderator Miriam Rasch introduced Richard Metzger’s commentary in light of his article “I Want My Friends Back” on DangerousMinds.Net [Twitter, Facebook] As practice against the political economy of social networks, a protest of sorts, it went viral. Metzger’s beef with Facebook is that they initiated algorithm changes without consideration of the trickle-down effects (1). A [...]

Tobias Leingruber – The Future of Identity in a Digital World

By Andrew Erlanger, March 24, 2013

Tobias Leingruber is part of the Free Art and Technology Lab, a diverse collection of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers and musicians who strive to enrich the public domain ‘one mutha-fuckin LOL at a time’. Embracing this spirit, the Munich-based communication designer spent years remixing the web with various hacks before turning his attention to Mark [...]

Miriyam Aouragh – Social Media as Damocles Sword: The Internet for Arab Activists

By kimberlyrosewaldbillig, March 24, 2013

Miriyam Aouragh’s work with cyberpolitics in the Middle East as well as cyberwarfare in the context of Arab-Israeli conflict has revealed that even scholarly engagement ignores to a large extent the non-media ecology of the Arab activists of the Internet world. In these very special contexts, the materiality of technology is inescapable – her discussion today focuses [...]

Hester Scheurwater – Shooting back

By thereseschedifka, March 24, 2013

“They are my ways of reacting on the imitated and fake media images of woman.” Hester Scheurwater presents herself as a very critical and reflective speaker with an artistic approach at the third Unlike Us conference. By speaking about her high heels daily diary she reflects on the boundaries of Facebook as a state with [...]

The Federated Web Show – Rethinking Decentralization

By Katía Truijen, March 23, 2013

The best way to criticize platform monopolies is to support alternative free and open source software that can be locally installed. A lot of alternative social networks are being developed with the aim to give users greater power, for example over their data. During The Federated Web Show, five speakers from different backgrounds discussed the [...]