Harry Halpin

Harry Halpin - UnlikeUS 2012

Harry Halpin woke everyone up from their late morning slumper by shouting into the mike alot - it worked. He is a member of the W3C web consortium which tries to lobby on web policy. He sort of presented a history of the 'like' button, but included lots of other tasty net historical elements. These included the fact that the 'Like' button includes RDF code. So when your browsing choices are being logged it using the structure of RDF, the only problem is the 'who' of who is looking at a particular piece of content is being saved back to FB closed database. Halpin also pointed to a interesting document which outlined the vision for social media in terms of the social graph from 2007, all of which has been implemented by FB with a few pertinent changes (one of the documents collaborators David Recordon now works for FB). He also stated that "Facebook is capturing your ontology - your Life world" which provoked a few chuckles. 

UnlikeUs Morning Meeting

I attended the UnlikeUs morning meeting - I felt like a sneak sitting at the back making notes. I wasn't though, just interested how they planned on moving forwards etc. Two things of note, Geert Lovink compared social media to pop culture, which is why it was not taken seriously, or was perhaps easy to dismiss. This relates to a point I have made in my research about artist taking leave from it as it doesn't constitute a serious platform, or location of inquiry. Whilst I understand both sides I just do not feel comfortable to remove myself from it. The other notable point was that the Netherlands was as equally fucked financially as the UK academic scene.

Artists Use, misuse or dissertion of social media

The afternoon session featured a collection of artists who in some manner had engage in social media through their practice. Walter Langelaar spoke about his group moddr who made the popular Web Suicide Machine artwork (which was actually preceded by a burger King advert). The next piece they are working on is the GIve Me My Data plugin that allows users to download all their data from the walled garden of platforms such as Facebook. Speaking afterwards to Walter we talked about his exodus from CSMP commercial social media platforms, and the fact he will not be returning, as well as the difficulty of working with communities with FLOSS, as a way of staging an alternative rendering of social media practice.

Dimitry Kleiner - UnLikeUs 2012

Other practitioners of note were Dmytri Kleiner who presented various projects made with in association with telekommunisten. Of particular note was the project thimbl a micro-blogging application that relies on the finger protocol , which was developed in the 1970's, and is included in all current server releases. A case of certain communitarian principles being in place early on and then being included, but not used as these principles were realigned. As Kleiner stated ' capitalism will never fund P2P networks as there is not place for the cash booths'.

Reification 2.0

In the second part of the morning session of the UnlikeUs conference Dylan Wittkower gave is presentation. His research focuses on the sociological appraisal of the social graph invoked by social media. He noted several phenomena ranging from the marketing of products to friends within social media (in order to win a prize) to the real focus of his talk, the methods that are used to construct and expose identity see:

"Wittkower also discusses four main strategies of identity construction on the spectrum of proactive, reactive, unitary and divergent. An untidy identity – found at the corner of proactive and divergent – relies on the actions of others, such as tagging, in the making of an individual’s online preseence. A spectacular identity – proactive and unitary- draws on Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle. It is an experience of the Self as a thing, protecting itself outwardly and ridden with interpassivity and simulacrazation. A distributed identity – reactive and divergent – is constructed on the walls of others, on group pages or on fan pages. A lurking identity – reactive and unitary – does just that: lurks aroud the Web and takes no further action. Wittkower believes that some of these strategies will resolve into more meaningful forms of interaction. Whereas friendertainment might lead to teleboredom, asking the network may very likely lead to fruitful conversation."

Bits of Freedom

The police picking up their Big Brother Award 2011

On arriving at the UnlikeUs conference we popped into the last session of the Thursday, bits of freedom were talking about various projects - particularly where they had influenced legal precedent in respect to Facebook and privacy laws in Europe. All of this points towards the campaign Europe versus Facebook, where the incompatibilities between FB and European law are played out, for example in requesting your data from FB, see here. Bits of Freedom also host the big brother awards which celebrate those agencies and players most culpable in abuses of freedom and privacy.

unlikeus conference amsterdam day one [tmorning]

Todays conference was really good, and the venue was the upstairs from the subterrarian pit where yesterdays presentations took place. after a great breakfast Gert lovink gave a really good intro calling for a form of web sociology.

Jodi Dean (usa) spoke very interestingly about the constitution of the social in social media critique. she gave three definition of the contention that society does not exist. Her first the neo-liberal version as espoused by thatcher, the second a rendering provided by ANT/Object theory and third the version provided by Lacau & Mouffe. Her point was that social media is a mirror each of these contentions and the motif of the network, as the representative of the social, is a simulacra of these relationships. her claim was that if society did exist then there would not be a need for social media platforms.

She consistently problematicised social media critique for always talking of dispersion, privacy and identity concerns (a position she stated it shared with the neo liberal dismissing of society) what she asked would their version of social media look like ? was not more a fact that these critics had - from a psychoanalytic viewpoint - had issues with trust, that they did not trust these vast conglomerations.

So for dean it was not the issues of the vast numbers of users, the bottleneck, but rather that these were concentrated into the hands of one person/company. And that dispersion is more likely to produce the 'one' of neo liberal politics, as she said, 'no long tail without the strong one' - and there is in fact an underlying desire that people want to be part of a whole. for instance in the claim that twitter enabled the recent arab spring protests was dismissed as confusing the form, which allows for collectivity, and focusing on the content. FB then is the private ownership of this form of collectivity and that is the problem with FB.