ISA2010

Video of my experience at ISA2010 in Gothenburg, July 11-17 2010.
Mine and Jessica Linde’s presentation is here.

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.

e-Youth Roundup

This is me (left) with my fellow presenters during the “Content Production” session at the e-Youth conference in Antwerp, May 27-28 2010. Now, it seems as if a publication (not featuring myself, however) will come out of the conference, and a set of photos from the event have also been published here. My talk is still available here.

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.

virt3c@hull, day 2

The second day of VIRT3C included even more interesting meetings and presentations. Mathieu O’Neil spoke on the possibilities of doing research on the net and being critical. According to him, critique is about distance. You establish a distance from an object and look at it while standing away from it. Sociology is a history of the present, and being critical in the context of sociology therefore means standing outside of the present. Mathieu applied Bourdieu’s field theory to internet networks, and also mentioned an interesting paper The Sociology of Culture in Computer-Mediated Communication by Elizabeth Lawley.

Stefan Merten of Oekonux gave a great talk about peer production. Peer production is not “facebook”, it is a production process featuring external and internal openness. It is based on Selbstentfaltung. In short, Selbstentfaltung is an important precondition for peer production, which merges individual well-being with societal needs. Volunteers contribute what they select themselves, which guarantees non-alienated leadership.

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]

DVIS at the Swedish victimological conference

Today, we are presenting a new research project called DVIS – Domestic Violence and the Internet in Sweden. The goal of this project is to map how victims of domestic violence in Sweden are using the internet and social media both to find information and to connect with networks of people that they may not otherwise have access to when living in situations of domestic violence.

This project is planned over three years, and will end with a symposium to which policy makers, victim’s rights advocates, and researchers will be invited in order to start a discussion about domestic violence victims’ habits online and how we can learn from these habits so as to provide information and support to the people who need it.

One thing that we have noticed, just in the short amount of time since we have begun this project, is how much networking and conversation is going on outside of forums that are dedicated to domestic abuse support. Perhaps this is an issue of safety, as cookies to places like Post Secret, Twitter and Second Life landmarks are not as dangerous as cookies to women’s (and men’s) help organizations. Actually, PostSecret has a very interesting and active community and when postcards are posted that talk about abuse, there are often many instances of other’s ‘reporting’ or showing solidarity through telling similar accounts.

Beyond systems of support, what happens when this technology – that we argue could play an important role in providing a social network when real-world networks have been removed – is used against the victim? If the aide agency does not have a warning, will the user think of clearing – or know how to clear – the browser history? Will pictures posted on Facebook of a child’s birthday party, which the uploader thought only a select few would be able to see, but due to holes in security when commenting on something, provide a way for an abuser to find the victim’s location?

More information about the DVIS project can be found on the project’s website here.

The presentation that we will give today can be found here (in Swedish).