The Subpolitics of Online Piracy

Below is a video (slides+audio) of mine and Jessica Linde‘s presentation about the Swedish online piracy movement, given in the joint RC07/RC14 session on New Media Futures: Collective Action and Politics at ISA2010 in Gothenburg, July 16th 2010. We had a great experience doing this, since all of the other papers in this session were also very interesting, and it was great that 22 people (not counting paper presenters) had found their way to this session even though it took place on Friday night just before the congress party. We had a good discussion and met a couple of people that we intend to stay in touch with.

YouTube Panic?

My talk about media coverage and discourse on youth, youtube and risks at the e-Youth conference in Antwerp, Belgium, May 28th 2010.

Pirate discourse talk

This is my talk, given today at the NMIC2010 conference.

Bonus material (questions and discussion) can be found here.

NMIC2010 in Istanbul

This week, I am attending NMIC2010 in the lovely city of Istanbul. The 2nd International Conference of New Media and Interactivity brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and countries to discuss topics such as the theoretical and conceptual framework of new media, new media and visual culture, networks and web technologies, and everyday life and new media.

This morning, I had the opportunity to listen to Christine Ogan – one of the keynote speakers – who gave an interesting talk about the role played by mass communication theory in the process wherein new theory has been developed in the field of new media research in the last ten years.

In the afternoon, I attended a number of interesting paper presentations: M. Hank Hausler spoke of urban digital media displays and the development of a protocol for generating collaborative creative content generation on such screens. At the intersection of architecture, information and culture, there is a lot of work to be done to meet the needs emerging from new modes of communication, and new ways of appropriating and navigating urban space. The things that are being done by Hank’s research group (UrbanAid, University of Sydney) seem really promising and exciting as regards possibilities for turning urban environments into connected multi-media spaces.

Melda Öncü Yıldız had written a thought-provoking paper on how the use of 3D computer graphics in movies affect the narrative and mode of storytelling, using examples from Star Trek, Star Wars, Tron, Lord of the Rings etc. to discuss this.

My colleague Ragnar Lundström did very well with his presentation on Representations of Benefit Fraud: Comparing Newspaper and Blog Discourse in Sweden and the UK. The talk was well delivered and generated the most engaged discussion of all of the papers in his session. All of the papers from NMIC2010 are available in a phonebook sized proceedings volume that will hopefully be available online in the near future.

In the wake of the Bjästa case

The Bjästa case, more thoroughly described by bénédicte at http://snegourotchka.blogspot.com has been a quite major news event in Sweden lately. There is a 58 minute documentary from Swedish television available here. In brief, the case revolves around the rape of a 14 year old girl by an older boy in a school toilet in the small town of Bjästa in Sweden. She reported this to the police, the boy confessed, but still no one believed her. Adults and kids alike all seemed to think that, because he was too handsome and kind, it could never be true that the boy in question had committed a sexual offense. Social media has been a highlighted topic in news reporting and other public discourse on the events as much of the hate campaign towards the victim seems to have taken place through such platforms. There was, for example, a Facebook support group for the perpetrator.

I was invited to Örnsköldsvik, close to Bjästa, this Saturday to an event where youth workers, teachers, NGO representatives, politicians, as well as people in general gathered to discuss how to “deal with” youth culture, morality, and social media in the wake of these events. My main point was that the Bjästa case, even though illustrating the great potential of social media to mobilize people and to get your message out (no matter what it may be), could of course had happened just as well without these tools. I devoted my talk to try to give an objective account of the potential as well as pitfalls of using digital media for social and cultural aims. Around 150 people turned up, and my contribution was well-received. It feels good to take part in these kinds of things when you actually feel that you can make some sort of difference. The radio coverage as well as the tv coverage of the event is available online.

sub*culture

My talk from VIRT3C@Hull 2010

from simon lindgren on Vimeo.

virt3c@hull, day 1

I am now at the Inaugural Interdisciplinary Conference of the Virtual Communication, Collaboration and Conflict (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]

Takahashi slides @ SMC

I did a talk on creative net cultures at the Norrlandsoperan restaurant today. The event was arranged by Social Media Club in Umeå, and I was glad to see that so many people turned up for my lunch lecture. The crowd was mixed, the reaction was good, and all in all it was nice — as always — to meet practitioners working in those fields that I research.

The SMC people had warned me that the large windows of the restaurant tended to make it difficult to show any slides in there. Still, I decided to try it anyway, but with super clear slides. I then remembered having read about the Takahashi presentation method a while back. I did a variant of that by using extra large text on my slides — even though not switching slides as rapidly as seems to be required for a textbook Takahashi or Lessig presentation and it worked out nice.

Research update

I am sending in two applications for research funding this week. One is on social media and political participation, and the other is on independent computer games and subcultural innovation. I will take part in VIRT3C in Hull, UK in March, and I also recently started a collaboration with the Crisis and Media Society Research Program at Helsinki University. Later this week, we will host yet another event in HUMlab. This time it is about presenting our research to potential funders. My slide for that is posted above. It was a bit of a challenge to summarize my research into one single image, but I guess it will work.

Common Culture of Umeå

I was invited to give a talk this Saturday at the free culture festival Common Culture of Umeå. I presented some of the results from my research project about cultures of online piracy, and concluded with discussing a set of theoretical concepts relating to the field of participatory culture in general. This event was a great opportunity to talk about, and discuss, issues that I do research on with young people that take an active part in such subcultures that interest me from the academic perspective.

It was inspiring to see that my research results and perspectives seemed to converge with their ways of thinking, even though we have come into this field from different directions, and navigate it in different ways. I have been toying for some time with the idea of writing something about what I would call “subcultural innovation”, and this experience fuelled these ideas even more.