Software Matters

The mid morning session concerned the various modalities of Facebook operation. I had at the start of the conference tried to count the number of times "Facebook" was mentioned, but after a frequency of 3 a minute I gave it up as fruitless. Points of note were the consideration of different CSMP characteristics, FB is about intimacy, Google search about expansion. The various economies that have informed the expansion of the web - The 'hit' economy, the 'link' economy and what we have now - the 'like' economy' which sees an expansion of FB outside of its traditional walled garden through an externalisation via the 'like' button (which previously only appeared inside the platform (Anne Helmond & Caroline Gerlitz) -this has externalised the open graph turning it into a social graph, which is impossible to opt out of because of the passive interactivity of social plugins such as the 'Like' button. David Berry author of 'The philosophy of software' made some points of note: he talked of 'nudge behaviour' as being promoted by web bugs (social plugins), he cited a Pew statistic 73% of Americans did not want to be tracked online". He mentioned a project by Mark Merino called 'Scaler'  His books include, the forthcoming Critical Theory and the Digital (due 2012), The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (2011), and Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source (2008). He is co-author of Libre Culture (2008), and editor of Understanding Digital Humanities (2012).