The Web Ecology project published the first study (an initial survey) on the new web hype ChatRoulette where a user is randomly paired with another user for chatting. Randomness in the informational web can be found on Google with its “I’m feeling lucky” button, on StumbleUpon with its “Stumble!” button and on Blogger with its Next Blog link. Randomness in the social web is less common but may be seen in the practice of adding random contacts or ‘friends’ in order to gain more followers (which is often considered to be a marker of popularity).

One of the main research questions of “How does the structure of ChatRoulette shape general modes of participation and cultural practices on the platform?” led to an interesting conclusion:

The technical code of ChatRoulette plays a key role in influencing the culture fashioned on the platform. However, unlike other structure for community creation on the Web like Facebook or Twitter,ChatRoulette enforces social rules that depend on the inverse proportion between the temporal and the social: as more time is spent with one user, you encounter fewer other users. ChatRoulette prioritizes the one-on-one (or, group-on-group) relationship that other social networks bypass when they strive to collect larger and larger groups of friends, colleagues, followers, etc. (Alex Leavitt & Tim Hwang 2010)

The code of a platform restricts and allows for certain social interactions. At first sight, ChatRoulette seems to be a platform for random and short-lived communication with the popular next button. However, the underlying code of the ChatRoulette platform privileges longer communication with a single person. In contrast to social networking sites where status seems to be measured by the amount of friends, ChatRoulette prioritizes one-on-one relationships.

My first ChatRoulette session (with support from my colleagues in the background) was actually with a Dutch guy who read about ChatRoulette in the newspaper this morning:

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Page info for Twitter.com

In Firefox hit -i or control-i for Page Info and go to the Security tab to view your own Privacy and History of the page. How addicted are you?

Presented at the DMI mini-conference, University of Amsterdam, day 2.

Introduction to my paper on Identity 2.0
Yesterday we talked about the web having technological eras, or periods of the web that have specific providers, software and templates. This is also what I indirectly undertake in my study into the reconfiguration of identity in the era of search engines. By studying different software platforms for presenting the self online through their medium specific qualities we see what Fuller calls “digital subjectivity – that software constructs sensoriums, that each piece of software constructs ways of seeing, knowing and doing in the world that at once contain a model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is used” (2003: 19)

The reconfigured relationship between the user, the platform and the search engine is studied from what Manovich calls ‘cultural software,’ a genre of software that is cultural through its use and because it carries atoms of our culture. It is an undertaking that looks at the different software platforms that have been developed over time to allow us to understand how the configuration of the ecology the software is embedded is in has changed with the advent of the search engines. The platforms: the homepage, the blog, the social networking profile, the micro-blog and the lifestream are not presented in a chronological order in order to create a teleological account, rather they are presented in more or less the order in which they came into being. All platforms for presenting the self online still exist, while one may argue that the homepage is slowly disappearing, and some platforms even co-exist in the hands of the user who integrates her Twitter account into her blog.

In general, the Digital Methods Initiative researches society through the online, however, what I aim to do is research online web culture through the online software and devices that shape it. How is this research placed within digital methods? At first it seems an ethnographical account of my Web 2.0 being placed within the studies into identity but what it aims to do is to look at the medium specific qualities of the platforms and determine their web native elements, such as the permalink or the status update, in order to see how these tie up to search-engines. In a first small casestudy, it was shown that platforms relate to each other and that some platforms are closer together than others through their entanglement of structuring natively digital objects such as site feeds and embed codes. The question then is, how to operationalize the relationship between the platforms and their distance (topological).

This paper is based on the Networked book chapter ‘Lifetracing’¹ commissioned by Turbulence. Rewritten for the Digital Methods Initiative mini-conference January 20-22, 2010 at the University of Amsterdam.

Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software.

ABSTRACT: This essay deals with the change of identity on the web as a result of the assemblage of social software platforms, engines and users. It can be stated that major platforms for presenting the self online have developed over time: the homepage, the blog, the social networking profile, the micro-blog and the lifestream. They each have their own specific way for presenting the self online. The advent of the search engine has had a major impact on both the construction and the presentation of the online identity. Search engines not only index the platforms on which identity is performed, but they also organize and construct identity online. They act as a central point where identity performance is indexed. Since identity construction and identity performance have significantly changed with the advent of these engines, identity must be reconsidered. It can be argued that the assembly of platform, engine and user has constructed a new type of identity: Identity 2.0. This type of identity, placed within the period of Web 2.0, is always under construction, never finished, networked, user-generated, distributed and persistent.

Download PDF: Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software.

1. Helmond, Anne. “Lifetracing. The Traces of a Networked Life.” Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art). 2 July 2009. Available online: http://helmond.networkedbook.org/[↩]

C-Mon & Kypski launched the ‘One Frame of Fame‘ project based on user-generated content and active fan and user participation. If you have a webcam you can be part of their music video for their new single ‘More is Less.’ They are leveraging their fan base by crowdsourcing the content of their new videoclip.The idea is that eventually all the frames in the video will be filled with webcam snapshots from people posing. “Just” copy the pose on the screen (actually I had a bit of trouble with the first suggested pose which was rather difficult), hit take Take Snapshot and if the pose matches, upload it to the server. I just contributed this pose (hit play to see the video in progress):

It’s entertaining, it’s simple and by being able to share it on Twitter, Facebook and Hyves and allowing to embed the unfinished videoclip with your personal pose, C-Mon & Kypski show the fun in participatory culture. Do you also want to have your One Frame of Fame? Contribute!

Last week I gave a presentation on social secrets of the web and their privacy issues for the Social Secrets Graduation Workshop at the University of Applied Science/HvA. The presentation (in Dutch) was filmed and can be viewed online at the Social Secrets website or in low-res below:

Anne Helmond from Socialsecrets on Vimeo.

The slides are in English and are online at Slideshare.

Photo by Social Secrets

Sander Veenhof / SNDRV launched a new project for his graduation at the Gerrit Rietveld art academy in Amsterdam. He explains the concept in his press release:

I’ve created an installation that allows anyone in the world to help me grow a bouquet of flowers to color up the graduation ceremony. The bouquet is growing in an interactive greenhouse powered by the publicity this announcement generates.

The project seems to refer to the ‘attention economy’ online we are slowly getting addicted to. We want to know who wrote about us and where and the more the better. Why not use these narcissistic web trends to grow your own flowers?

This is once again a great project by Sander Veenhof so I’ve already tweeted about the project to stimulate the growth.

Of course I also uploaded a screenshot of my tweet to Flickr and I also added the project page to my delicious links. Help Sander grow his own graduation bouquet of flowers by blogging/tweeting/etc about this project.