I am now at the Inaugural Conference of the VIRT3C Research Group at the University of Hull. The overall themes are collaborative production and the exploration of strengths and weakness of peer technology and open projects.

VIRT3C will bring leading cybertheorists, internet, peer production and social networking experts together for knowledge-sharing, and collaboration in interdisciplinary academic projects, facilitating original ideas for research and funding applications. It will provide a physical base and a hub of activity, provoking and supporting new ideas of research to several successful virtual networks, such as the P2P Foundation, Oekonux and other virtual communities.

During the first day, I did a talk called sub*culture: exploring the dynamics of a networked public. It was part of the session on “Network Publics, Citizenship and Piracy” where the two other presenters were Johan Söderberg, who gave an interesting talk about the Swedish pirate movement, and Athina Karatzogianni whose presentation was on the China-Google cyberconflict. The full programme can be found here.

Some highlights from my notepad during day 1:

– “bankable dissent” (Yang, 2009) seems to be an interesting concept

–  Judith Butler’s paper “Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Utterance” (1997) has some nice passages about how “one cannot know in advance the meaning that the other will assign to one’s utterance” (p. 365)

– “the Megan Meier affair” is a telling and tragic, however extreme, example of cyberbullying

– the paper “Sharing Nicely” by Yochai Benkler seems to be worth checking out

– three recent trends in web 2.0 as identified by Geert Lovink: (1) the colonization of real-time [using technology to get as close as possible to real-time events]; (2) comment culture and the rise of extreme opinions; (3) the emergence of national webs [a global internet has become utopian, again]