On November 9, 2010 Olia Lialina presented her new book on Digital Folklore. The book describes the aesthetics of the amateur web which has been Lialina’s object of study for the past ten years. The book reflects on amateur culture as the basis of the Web; the web that has been built by us, the amateurs. The Vernacular Web refers to the aesthetics of the early web of the amateurs. Not only the World Wide Web but also the 3D amateur culture and font creators indirectly contributing to the graphics online. It is about being a “real” user that uses Comic Sans. Part of the challenge of creating the Digital Folklore book was how to translate the World Wide Web into paper?

The term digital folklore is a term where everybody seems gets the idea but it is not clearly defined. Folklore is traditionally defined as: “The “traditional,” usually oral literature of a society, consisting of various genres such as myth, legend, folktale, song, proverb, and many others.” (Routledge). But how do we translate this type of oral literature to the web genres of under construction banners and animated gifs? The book describes what digital folklore is, why it is important and why it should be studied. It presents digital folklore as a field of study.

Digital Folklore encompasses the customs, traditions and elements of visual, textual and audio culture that emerged from users’ engagement with personal computer applications during the last decade of the 20th and the first decade of the 21st century.¹

User Timeline

The preface of the book, ‘Do you believe in Users?,’ is presented by Lialina and is shown as a Google Docs working document in Comic Sans. The preface is a historical account of the changing role of the user in the history of computers:

1940′s Vannevar Bush – imaged the Memex, the table, a personal working stage, where the user was the Scientist.
1960′s Douglas Engelbart, the user was the Knowledge Worker, Intellectual Worker and the Programmer.
1970′s XEROX PARK: Thacker, Alan Kay, Licklider (History of the personal workstation) – Lady with the Royal Typewriter, Kids, Real Users (People who are buying computers, especially personal computers)
1974 Ted Nelson – Dream Machines, the Naive User² Two categories of users: user hackers and naive users. A user can be a developer of the system with no distinction between developer and user.
1982 TRON – You believe in the Users? Big moment for the user, the user as God.

1983 Time Magazine, “The Computer Moves in.” Machine of the Year. Technology becomes the person of the year.
1993 Eric S. Raymond: September that never ended. User lacking netiquette. “September that never ended” refers to a phenomenon happening since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhytms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plugging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. (more info)

1996 The New Hacker’s Dictionary is a lexicon which contains an entry on the user:

user n.

1. Someone doing `real work’ with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. See real user. 2. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions. [GLS observes: This is slightly unfair. It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Sometimes they are thoughtful or deep. Very often they are annoying or downright stupid, apparently because the user failed to think for two seconds or look in the documentation before bothering the maintainer.] See luser. 3. Someone who uses a program from the outside, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports bugs instead of just going ahead and fixing them.

The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and lusers. The users are looked down on by hackers to some extent because they don’t understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few users who do are known as `real winners’.) The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context. (source)

The entry clearly distinguishes between implementors (hackers) and lusers (users). Lialina observes that twelve years later the Software Studies lexicon does not contain an entry dedicated to the user.

2006 Time Magazine: YOU!

From 1983 onwards people are designing posters in Word, praise activity of the users that are disrespected, the users that are not developers. You are now appreciated for your lolcats, your Facebook Likes. The User is only appreciated now.

An alternative history

The history of the World Wide Web is often dated in 1993 with the appearance of the Mosaic browser. It marks the year when the first users started to design the web. While Tim Berners-Lee invented the technology that build the web four years earlier, in 1989, the web was shaped by its users from 1983 onwards. In this publication (Digital Folklore) the user is pushed to the foreground. As such it provides a different history which foregrounds the users instead of the technology.

The idea of the “Rich User Experience” is one that typically accompanies Web 2.0. The term refers to all the Ajax apps with a richer interaction in the browser but also in general the claim that with Web 2.0 and social networking sites users finally have a rich experience. In the Midnight project based on Google Maps the rich user experience is hiding the real user experience. In the Gravity project navigating is done by scrolling providing a more rich interactive experience to scrolling.

The research not only about aesthetics but also about what the user could be and how to change it. One example of such a project is Trailblazers:

This is a project by Theo Seemann, a student of Russian online art pioneer Olia Lialina at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart. Seemann created Trail Blazers as a surfing match in which the winner is the person who can find the shortest path between two sites, with only a mouse to navigate. The player has no keyboard and cannot use a search engine. The game is played with a slightly modified browser that registers every click. Besides being a lot of fun the project seems like a declaration of war on the search engine. It is a return to the feel of the early Web, in which navigation largely depended on links. In this sense it is also a return to the truly social web. In a time when the search engine, and this is usually Google, increasingly guesses the pathway (‘did you mean?’), link surfing is the digital equivalent of the six degrees of separation. (Josephine Bosma on Neural.it)

The project is based on the Memex from Vannevar Bush where he describes the (professional) users of the system as trail blazers: “‘There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.’” (Bush, 1945) Lialina shares that the most difficult part of the Trailblazers projects was how to get out of walled gardens like Facebook.

Related projects and writings by Olia Lialina

• Digital Folklore
• A Vernacular Web
• Art.Teleportacia.org (Net.art)
• Prof. Dr. Style.
• Trailblazers

1.  Dragan Espenschied and Olia Lialina, Digital Folklore: To Computer Users, with Love and Respect (Merz Akademie, 2009). [↩]
2. “Person who doesn’t know about computers but is going to use the system. Naive user systems are those set up to make things easy and clear for such people“. Ted Nelson: “The Most important computer terms for the 70′s”, in Dream Machines, Tempus Books, 1987, p.9 [↩]

Tagcloud created with Wordle

Being very meta: Visualizing Lev Manovich’ new article ‘What is Visualization?‘ in a tag cloud:

Tag cloud exemplifies a broad method that can be called media visualization: creating new visual representations from the actual visual media objects, or their parts. [...] In view of our discussion of data reduction principle, we can also call this method direct visualization, or visualization without reduction. (Manovich 2010) [emphasis mine]

Within my research I am currently focussing on the notion of links as the currency of the Web (Walker 2002) and to what extend that still holds up in Web 2.0. Together with Carolin Gerlitz from Goldsmith, University of London we are investigation to what extent the Like, the Share and the (re)Tweet are new types of web currencies? Michael Arrington claims on Techcrunch in 2009 that ReTweets Are The New Currency Of The Web. Looking into the technological differences between the currency of the link and the currency of social media (number of Likes/Shares/Tweets/Diggs etc) they are fundamentally both the same: they both refer to a hyperlink, or specifically a URL. However, while both are technically links, they are different types of links. I would consider the Like or (re)Tweet a pre-configured link. The link has already been made. The link is embedded within the button. In Web 1.0 links had to be manually created and in Web 2.0 social media platforms with their associated buttons (either offered by the platform itself or by people building on the platform) profit from pre-configured links.

This is the transcript of the Digital Methods Initiative Advanced Program Projects week 2 opening talk on Issuecrawler 1.0 and Social Media by Anne Helmond.

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?

A few hours ago the following tweet by @librarycongress appeared in my timeline  “Library acquires ENTIRE Twitter archive. ALL tweets. More info here http://go.usa.gov/ik4”

All your tweets are belong to us

This is big. The ENTIRE archive containing ALL tweets? But if we read the official announcement on the Library of Congress blog it states “all public tweets” which seems like it will not include protected accounts and direct messages. The LoC blog went down due to the amount of attention so they decided to post the announcement on Facebook (as it contained more than 140 characters ;)) where a discussion immediately started off. Users are either surprised by this acquisition because they don’t see the value in it, or they are upset because they have acquired their personal tweets. However, as Manuel Magaña notes on Facebook, everytime you press “tweet” you agree to Twitter’s Terms of Service. Even if Twitter feels like a common good, it is still a company that can sell your personal user generated content. However, the Library of Congress is a “federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress” (About) and as such serves the members of Congress which may raise critical inquiries of using Twitter’s archive for political purposes and investigations.

Twitter as a historical tool

So how could the LoC tweet archive be used by researchers? In response to the value of the Twitter archive Randy Rice on Facebook describes how Twitter may serve as a people’s history for historians. With the Digital Methods Initiative we have previously used Twitter to write about the Iran (Green) Revolution by using tweets containing the #iranelection hashtag. Twitter is currently very limited in its use for historical accounts as documented by people present at events. Twitter’s search archive only goes back two weeks and only a custom built scraper may be able to retrieve older tweets. This is not within the skills of the sociologist or historian but an accessible archive may open up a new, huge, sourceset. How does one make sense of an enormous database filled with tweets? One way is to scrape hashtags for a certain event. Two questions remain: 1. will the entire archive become public? 2. will it contain a search function?

A mosaic of humanity

Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s “I Want You To Want Me” is an installation that documents our search for love on online dating sites. By scraping all the public data from dating sites it is “a very fertile ground for building a mosaic of humanity” according to Harris. When we enter our thoughts and feelings into databases we can use these for datamining to say something about our culture. And that is exactly what the Library of Congress seems to want. It acknowledges that not only books are part of our cultural heritage but also the updates on Twitter:

We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations. (Raymond 2010)

I love widgets, those easy drag-and-drop plugins, copy-paste pieces of code that form customizable apps. But I think I’m just going to call them thingumabobs from now on.

I just love these synonyms for widget.