The 2.0 denotes an ‘improved’ or progressional version of the web that builds upon and develops Web 1.0. [...] Implicitly rooted in this vision of the web is a sense of teleological progress, of purposeful and directed development, of continual and designed improvement. (Beer 2009: 986)

Instead of looking at Web 2.0 as the “next” version of the web, we can also look at the changes in the structure of the web, specifically looking at web native objects. In this view, Web 1.0 consists of the static page, whereas Web 2.0 consists of dynamic pages filled with the web native object of the status update or the post. This may be seen in the blog and specifically in RSS – denoting changes to a page-, which could be considered a main object of study in the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and in the social networking site with its profiles that display a page (The Wall) filled with posts. An important shift has taken place in the structure of the web: in Web 1.0 hyperlinks mainly link to static pages and objects and in Web 2.0 the hyperlink links to dynamic pages and objects. This shift affects the way we map and analyze the web.

In general terms, Web 2.0 is a concept that forms part of the lexicon of a range of emerging accounts that commentate on a large-scale shift toward a ‘participatory’ and ‘collaborative’ version of the web, where users are able to get involved and create content. (Beer 2009: 986)

This ‘participatory’ and ‘collaborative’ web has created new objects and new types of hyperlinks that characterize Web 2.0: the subscribe, the like, the share, the nr of retweets, the submit to Digg, the save to Delicious, the social network profile, the shortened url, etc. The question also becomes, are these new characteristics forming a new currency of the web? In Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web, Jill Walker describes links as the currency of the web and asks what its currency is. Even though there is a black market for links she notes that “The more common form of trade in this economy of links is barter exchange. Reciprocal linking and link exchange are common practice, and are loosely organised as favours or more systematically in web rings and blogrolling.” (Walker 2002)

Is the hyperlink still the currency of the web in Web 2.0?

If we want to map the current web, how can we use, or adjust, the IssueCrawler to deal with these new objects and new types of links? How do we map a dynamic web? Currently, the IssueCrawler collapses all social networking links from platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Current web mapping and analysis focuses on the interrelations between users on for example Twitter by isolating it. How can we map the current web by not looking at these platforms in isolation but as part of the so-called “ecosystem” they are part of?

The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The “velocity of information” is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. […] The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool. […] Internet culture is a culture of nowness. (Gelernter 2010)

The lifestream is characterized by both time (which we will deal with later) and cross-syndication. The interwoven social media platforms gathered into a central source. How can we analyze cross-platform syndication, which tools do we currently have at hand and which tools do we need to perform such an analysis?

The profile is a common feature of Web 2.0, and is the place where information is gathered about us, our activities, our choices, tastes and preferences and so on. (Beer 2009: 996)

One way into operationalizing Web 2.0’ifying the IssueCrawler is looking at the structure of different social networking sites and platforms. Profile structures may be checked by looking into username checkers. A second way is, instead of categorizing sites by their domain name (.edu, .us, .nl) is by type of platform. A third way is to move beyond the hyperlink as the prime object of mapping as proposed by for example Greg Elmer (2006).

How are networks formed in 2.0? One could argue that a network is formed through liking, sharing and saving in addition to linking. What are the web native objects and characteristics that form networks in the 2.0? What is the role of platforms in the formation of networks in 2.0? Considering the politics of platforms (Gillespie 2010), are some platforms more central than others? How open or closed are these platforms and how does this affect mapping?

The text above describes three meta-issues, which would translate into three projects:

1. Issuecrawler 2.0 > How to deal with the 2.0 in the network?
2. Types of 2.0 links/The link 2.0 > Is the hyperlink still the currency of the web in Web 2.0? How to compare recommendation objects? Hyperlink vs. the like or the share? What do they do to the quality of the web?
3. Cross-platform syndication > cross-spherical comparison of platforms? Content circulation analysis has become difficult in the social web
4. Platform dependency > Changing linking practices > Dutch Blogosphere. How and where to find issues in 2.0? How do you define what an actor is?

ANNE HELMOND / Identity 2.0 from sven g on Vimeo.

June 25th 2010 – 1h30min lecture presentation + group discussion

Anne Helmond is New Media PhD candidate with the Digital Methods Initiative at the Mediastudies department at the University of Amsterdam where she studied New Media from 2004-2008. For our Social Media & the Avatar Day, organized at the Memories of the Future symposium in Vooruit Ghent, we invited Anne to elaborate on her recent paper IDENTITY 2.0 – Constructing identity with cultural software.

Photo: 2010 Jöran Maaswinkel (@JeeeM) Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0

On Tuesday we celebrated the book launch of Frank Meeuwsen’s Bloghelden, a history of the Dutch blogosphere from 1995 to 2005, at SETUP in Utrecht. I was asked to give a presentation on a project Esther Weltevrede and I are working on: Mapping the Dutch blogosphere over time.

Photo by danischouten

In his article ‘Links, Lives, Logs: Presentation in the Dutch Blogosphere’ from 2003 author Frank Schaap distinguishes two types of bloggers in the Dutch blogosphere: the lifeloggers and the linkloggers.¹ These two types of blogs, the lifelogs and the linklogs, have very specific and different linking patterns. Anno 2010 we can distinguish a new type of blog: the platformlog.

The aim of this study is to map changing blogging practices within the Dutch blogosphere. This may be done by looking at changing linking practices and studying the linking structure of the Dutch blogosphere.

Method

• Create a startlist of URLs. In this casestudy we compiled a list from experts: Arie Altena, Gert-Jan Lasterie, Frank Meeuwsen's Bloghelden book, Merel Roze's article on the Dutch Blogosphere in Schrijven Voor Het Web, and Frank Schaap's article. In the future this list will be supplemented with the Webloglijst (an early semi-manual Technorati) and Nedstat top 1000 weblogs’ statistics.
• Create hyperlink networks over time with the Issuecrawler.

Preliminary findings

Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Hyves and other social media platforms appear as important actors within the network. In this sample of May 2010 Twitter is the dominant platform in the Dutch blogosphere receiving 34484 links from the crawled population. In 2010 social media platforms receive the most links from the crawled population indicating their prominence on the web and in the blogosphere. Claim: We have moved from a bloggers A-list to a platform A-list consisting of a top three of: Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. The linking structure of the Dutch blogosphere anno 2010 is characterized by social media platforms.

Maps

Click on the maps to download a hi-res PDF file (around 800K).

Social media platforms in the Dutch blogosphere

Dutch Blogosphere on 18 May 2010

Further research

• Look up URLs in the Internet Archive and create a special collection by archiving them. Visualize hyperlink networks over time with Gephi.
• How do linking practices change and which clusters emerge? When do the social media platforms arrive?
• Diagnosing the current condition of the early Dutch blogosphere.

Slides in English & Dutch

1. Frank Schaap, ‘Links, Lives, Logs: Presentation in the Dutch Blogosphere’, Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs < http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/links_lives_logs.html> [

On 9 January 2010 on the occasion of the honorary doctorate to be conferred upon Prof. Lawrence Lessig by the University of Amsterdam I attended Lessig’s keynote speech as part of the symposium on Open Content and Academic Publishing, Dutch Internet law expert Arnoud Engelfriet has an excellent blog post in Dutch in response to Lessig’s lecture and includes video. These are my notes from the lecture:

Observations on culture and copyright

According to Lessig copyright has little to do with the sphere of culture but the scope of copyright has changed drastically. It now touches everyone and everything and most of us cannot spend even an hour without colliding with copyright. This is because of the architecture of digital world where very few uses are copyright free. The digital architecture triggers the application of copyright. In the physical world, the reading of a book is unregulated. We allow free use of the book. Not fair use, but free use. We can even give the book away or sell it and it’s still a form of unregulated use. In the digital world this has changed as every single  use creates a copy. The platform by which we have access to copyrighted material such as books has changed. What does this mean for the media ecology

Professionals are people who depend on exclusive rights as part of their business model. They use copyright as a way to secure their business. The paradigm here is that if you don’t secure, you get less creativity. However, not all creators have the same business model. Copyright’s paradigm ignores these important cases that apply a different business model: amateur’s produce for the love, not for the money. This is critical for culture. The new ecology does not have exclusive rights but is building upon creativity within the ecology. The business model of this ecology is different.

There is a clash between the paradigm of copyright and the paradigm of creativity.

Two bits of culture

The ecology of books is one that preserves access well through library and used book shops. But when we compare it to the preservation of film there is something different going on. Film is often a compilation and its reuse is contingent of permissions of the rights holder. Documentaries contain snippets of other sources and it took Grace Guggenheim 20 years to clear the rights of her father’s legacy to transfer them to DVD. It seemed practically impossible to renew all the contracts of the snippets. Sadly, the vast majority of these films will disappear because nitrate film will dissolve before all rights are cleared.

What is different about these two bits of culture is the regime of rights under which books and films are created.

The ecology of creativity within science

What is the business model of science and what is its ethos? Science is about the common ownership of goods and entails a business model does that not build on exclusive rights. Lessig claims that the ecology of knowledge can actually be harmed by copyright. If the business model of science depends on sharing and building upon previous knowledge then how does the paradigm model of copyright help and where does it help? For example, academic journals violate the norm of science: to provide universal access to knowledge (Enlightenment ideal). Production costs made exclusive right ok in the past but these are now gone in the case of digital production and distribution. The open access movement aims to replicate the good in the process of peer review and access and avoid the evil in restrictions on access. An example is the Public Library of Science. Law has been oblivious to the ecology of creativity.

Ecology of access

Through the eyes of copyright there are three types of books:

1. In copyright and in print (9%)
2. In the public domain (16%)
3. Presumptively under copyright, but no longer in print (75%)

The Google Books project decided to scan the books first and then ask for permission. Soon after the launch of the project Google was sued by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors’ Guild for “massive copyright infringement.” The first category of books didn’t pose a problem because publishers and authors may be contacted and asked for permission. The second category doesn’t require permission. But the third category is a different case because all these books are still under copyright but no longer in print and there is very likely no one to ask permission. If you would need permission before scanning it would mean that 75% of all the books would disappear. This case eventually led to the McGraw-Hill settlement:

So, this project launched and then the lawsuit filed against it was then purportedly settled by an agreement last October (slide: 10/28/08). The agreement says that basically 20% of all of the books in that little category would be available freely to people as they want across the Google Book Search Library. Freely in the sense that Google was going to pay for that right, but at least the user could get access to it for free. And then you would have the right to purchase the full book. And that money the user would pay for would then go into a pool that would be held by some new corporation that would give it out to those orphaned authors, assuming they could be found some day in the future. What this settlement left open, importantly, was whether what Google did originally should be considered Fair Use. Google, rightly in my view, insisted that their original plan was protcted by Fair Use, and they did not give up that claim in the settlement, but of course, the Authors’ Guild disagrees with that. So, whether it’s fair use to make this scan or snippets, so that was still held open, but now the project would now open 20% of these books up, and obviously 20% is more than snippets. (Lessig talk transcription by calmansi)

What is the ecology that this settlement produces? We currently have full free access in libraries, not a mere 20% access (20% is a simplification of the actual formula of access). The settlement produces a radically different library. This is not a digital library being built but a digital bookstore! We are an obsessive permission culture and those permissions are now down to the level of the quote (Google snippets). This causes the fear that this permission architecture will now cement. Does this make sense?

What to do?

Changing law is hopeless but we can change norms and practices: Creative Commons. This may also be applied to science in Science commons:

1. Lower transaction costs of sharing, infrastructure to enable sharing. open access movement: 1000 journals
2. Open data. CC0 = a waiver, not a license, of all the rights one might possibly claim. Technical information sharing: RDFa, semantic web
3. Open materials. Scientists often deal with “stuff”. A Creative Commons infrastructure on the level of material, for example the personal genome project

We need to mark content with freedoms and make it human readable, lawyer readable and machine readable in RDF. Lessig calls for changing our norms and practices instead of trying to change the law.

More photos on Flickr licensed under an Attribution (Anne Helmond) – Noncommercial – No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic.

On October 31st I attended the first ASCA matinee with speaker Jussi Parikka from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. His talk, titled “Dead Media/Live Nature: Media Ecologies of Animal Intensities,” focused on the transpositions of media and nature through recent art projects such as Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji’s Eco Media (Cross Talk) and Garnet Hertz’s Dead Media lab.

In preparation of his talk we were sent three readings:

1. Matthew Fuller (2007), “Art for Animals.“
2. Jonathan Sterne, “Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media,” in Charles Acland, Residual Media.¹
3. Garnet Hertz (2009), Dead Media Project

On the Future of New Media

Sterne describes how the “new” in new media consists of two types of newnewss for scholars:

In short, there are really two models of “newness” to which scholars of media change need to attend: (1) the “newness” of a medium with respect to other media, and (2) the so-called state of the art in design and function within a given medium.  Scholars, journalists and many others who write about computers have tended to collapse the second sense of newness into the first. (p. 18) [...] In a weird, recursive way, new media are “new” primarily with reference to themselves. (p. 19)

What constitutes the new is the halfwayness² and planned obsolescence of new media:

Combined with the “halfwayness” of most new media, planned obsolescence guarantees the continued recursive experience of digital media as “new”. The newness of new media is sustained by people continually disposing of the equipment they have in anticipation of something better. (p. 23)

I admit. I am one of those people. Last summer I replaced my fully functional 30 gig iPod video with an 16 gig iPod Touch because it offered me something more advanced and something better. Not so much storage wise but purely in functionality. I no longer see my iPod (Touch) as my iPod but as a small portable computer device (with tons of great and useless apps) that happens to play music. My other iPod is now obsolete, it lies in the corner of my room waiting to be used because it is still fully functional, yet I have discarded it as old and no longer useful. Yet, I do not throw it away. Sterne attributes this to the fact that equipment is expensive so we do not immediately throw it away after we have discarded our obsolete hardware. However, once we do, it becomes part of the junkyard of computers which leads to environmental problems. This is where Garnet Hertz’ Dead Media Project comes in.

Dead Media Project

In Hertz’ Dead Media Initiative he addresses the crossroads of media archeology and media ecology. The project links between themes of nature and technics and points to the material contexts of media. The Dead Media Project has three interests:

1. Repurposing media as a creative artistic project: it addresses the problems of electronic waste (gasses etc). A new temporality: cycle of consuming, human time of use value.
2. Extending media beyond individual use: Media as a community and artistic production as seen in do-it-yourself  and circuit bending practices. It aims to extend media to what is at hand.
3. Innovation through analysis of media history. It entails a shift of emphasis that looks as the usefulness of obsolescence: it offers us cheap research and design. The dynamics of media change.

Media as the death of nature

According to Parikka there are new waves of media studies: media archeology, media ecology and dead media studies. These semantics point to a crucial need to rethink media culture that takes into account the overlapping and boundaries of nature, technology and culture. Jussi Parikka addresses the animal forces within technology.

A medium is often described as a communication network, which is a broad definition. The Cross Talk project looks at new media spheres that pass through humans where the body becomes part of the media network. Its objective is to try to find processes in the natural world, for example bodies, as conduits for communications. What are natural technics that can function as carriers of signals or messages?

Relationality is the approxamity of relations. If you want to understand an media essemblage you have to look at its relations. What are the compositional dynamics that constitute media ecologies?³ Parikka is interested in the links between the themes of nature and technics and the material contexts of media. In his Spam Book he describes the Anomalies of Network Society which connects to his current research because it is a way of looking at media in ways it is not usually looked at. Nature has been seen as secondary signification, especially in the UK based strand of Cultural Studies which focusses on the politics of media. Nature is seen as merely  an affordance.

In a non-representational approach/analysis we could ask what kind of objects are circulating within media ecologies? Moving to the field of Software Studies, software may be used as the basis for the study of non-human autonomous agents. Examples of this type of research is focused on swarms (for example Galloway on Swarm Games) and object-oriented programming. These swarms are algorithmic insects and they are what produce second order effects.

The two strands of Media ecology (Neil Postman & Matthew Fuller) seem to be merging where, according to Parikka, media ecologies becomes less of a critique but more of a new strand.

The origins of the field of media ecology lie in the Toronto School and the New York School. In ‘What is Media Ecology?‘ Lance Strate⁴ describes it as

technological determinism, hard and soft, and technological evolution. It is media logic, medium theory, mediology. It is McLuhan Studies, orality–literacy studies, American cultural studies. It is grammar and rhetoric, semiotics and systems theory, the history and the philosophy of technology.

Neil Postman, seen as the father of Media ecology, defines it as follows:⁵

Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. [...]

It tries to find out what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are seeing, why media make us feel and act as we do.

Media ecology is the study of media as environments.

What Fuller and Parikka contribute to the Postman’s Media ecology is the increasing solidification and naturalization of the non-technological within our society. By doing so it would like to expand media studies’ agenda by borrowing from nature. Approprating and expanding our standardized uses and understandings by reconsidering what on earth have we have previously considered as media and why. Koert van Mensvoort examines this reconsideration of media and nature in the Next Nature blog. In the Next Nature publication Michiel Schwarz describes this reconfiguration of media ecology through media, technology and nature:

In the age where we have genetic engineering, artificial beaches, nature-identical food flavourings and virtual environments, what we traditionally used to view as ‘nature’ has now become an object of human design. ‘So-called nature’ has become a culturally-constructed nature in a mediated world. In this world, it is perhaps fitting that we now manipulate not only what we believed to be nature, but we happily also manipulate our images of nature. (..) What the images of multiple natures reveal to us, then, is the ‘new ecology’ in which we now find ourselves. A new ecology, where natures, technologies and media are all caught up together. (Schwarz)

1. Acland, Charles R. Residual media. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. p 16-31.
2. As described in: Pacey, Arnold. The culture of technology. MIT Press, 1983.
3. Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005: p. 131
4. Lance Strate, “Understanding MEA,” In Medias Res 1 (1), Fall 1999.
5. Neil Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum.” in A.C. Eurich, ed., High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education (1970