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/[↩]

Carolin Gerlitz, Made by many: Tracing and mapping consumer/brand interaction across online spaces.

Respondent: Anne Helmond, University of Amsterdam. 21 January 2010.

“Made by many” in the paper title refers to the way brands are increasingly shaped and expressed in performative spaced on the web by consumers along with producers. Brands are constituted by the people who use them and interact with them. This interaction with brands is described from what I would propose to call “user generated marketing” as a branch, or side-effect, of user-generated content.

Gerlitz wishes to map and trace how consumers interact with brands across different webspheres using both digital methods and sociological methods, including topology. Gerlitz writes:

The way these heterogeneous spaces relate to each other will be understood from a topological perspective which emphasises the distance/resonance between spaces, the speed at which the objects/brands/issues move through them and the openness of the assemblage of spaces. (1)

An example of the coming together of these heterogenous spaces is the website of the brand Crispin, Porter + Bogusky which shows the result of the brand query across different spaces. This reminded me of the rebranding of Skittles.com which overlays a small navigation block in the topleft corner as an overlay to the social media sites they present themselves on. The Skittles homepage currently shows their Facebook Group “The Wall” with the latest messages from their fans (often not related to Skittles). The question then is: Is this the performance of a brand or a brand image? What is the difference between a brand an an image if we’re talking about producer-consumer interaction?

The major task of brand management to be developed is described as

a variety of techniques that all aim at controlling, pre-structuring and monitoring what people do with brands, so that what these practices do add to its value” (Arvidsson 2006, 82).

Has brand management shifted into the realm of webcare? While not officially defined, webcare seems to deal with companies keeping track of their brand in a particular websphere or across different spaces. For example @UPC_Webcase actively monitors Twitter for complaints about their tv/webservice and passively monitors Twitter by answering direct questions about their services. Is there a shift from the common practice of search-engine optimization for promoting your brand to webcare, consisting of search-engine monitoring and responding?

Case studies
In order to to explore the activities of the brands in her case studies Gerlitz uses a combination of methodologies primarily derived from

object oriented methodology (2007) with its leitmotif ‘follow the object’ and a topological perspective as a methodological framework. [...] Core element of the method is to abstain from reading, interpreting and analysing the object of interest but moving, navigating and unfolding with it, never exactly knowing in which direction it and therewith the research will drift. (5)

The question then arises: Don’t digital methods temporarily fix the object in time, by compiling a sample and taking a snapshot? While digital methods follow the medium do they also continue to follow the object as object oriented methodology does?  For example, one of the steps you describe in your paper deal with “the non-manual analysis of content” (9) which seems to oppose the object oriented method.

The second approach “The feedback loops between the consumers and the brand within and across these spaces will be explored by a mix of digital and qualitative social research methods.” A long list of research methods follows which feels like a broad mix. Specifying which research method belongs to which question (very likely addressed in future chapters) may give the reader some methodological coherence guidance.

Contribution
What Gerlitz contributes is a new area to apply digital methods to. Digital methods, due to the background of the program, are often used in research related to for example, human rights, controversy, NGOs, political issues,  while Gerlitz is associated with Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London doing research on brands. Her case studies, to me, showed that her paper on brands and my paper on identity are actually may be aligned through the notion of performative capacities.

Remarks
Additional research in spaces. Flickr: now: imagery, also: use of tags. YouTube: Trace embed codes. In which spheres do consumers place which videos?

How else to study consumer/brand interactions? By the actions consumers perform on social objects: +1, recommend it, love it/hate it, skip, next. There are certain typical actions consumers can perform on objects in the social web.

Questions
What is the role of bots in brand management? For example, automatic retweeting of brands by brand bots. What is the role of search engines in the feedback loops you describe?

Literature recommendation
Petersen, Søren. “Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation” First Monday [Online], Volume 13 Number 3 (2 March 2008)

The examples in this paper outline two different strategies within the architecture of exploitation that capitalism can benefit from:

Through a distributed architecture of participation, companies can piggyback on user generated content by archiving it and making interfaces, or using other strategies such as Google’s AdSense program.
Designing platforms for user generated content, such as Youtube, Flickr, Myspace and Facebook. (Søren 2008)

To what extent do Dove and American Apparel offer the users interfaces or platforms for interacting with/uploading content?

Abstract previous paper: Gerlitz, C (2009). ‘Made by many. Tracing and mapping the affective topologies of brands.’ presented at ATACD conference, Barcelona.

The Digital Methods Initiative is holding a three day mini-conference with workshop presenting papers and research proposals.Today I responded to Michael Stevenson’s paper on the history of the blogosphere through the eyes of EatonWeb and the Internet Archive. The following is my summary of his paper and argument followed by questions.

Michael Stevenson. The archived blogosphere: exploring web historical methods using the Internet Archive

Respondent: Anne Helmond, University of Amsterdam. 20 January 2010.

One of the main questions of Stevenson’s research is: How can we use and repurpose the Internet Archive to study the history of the blogosphere?  The Internet Archive is especially useful for single site histories, as the Archive is browsed by URL. However, websites rarely exist in a vacuum on their own. This is partly recognized by the special collections in the Archive on a particular topic or event. Blogs, and their (in)formal linking policies, constitute a different type of collection of sites that do not converge on topic or event but on their formal characteristics: the blogosphere. As Stevenson notes “The genre (of blogs) was defined less by content than by form, with reverse-chronology and the centrality of linking trumping the extent to which bloggers focused on similar topics.” How to deal with a collection of websites in an archive that constitute a separate websphere when the device used is especially useful for studying the history of single sites?

Historical accounts of the blogosphere are often from an anecdotal perspective (Blood 2000 & Rosenberg 2009). Stevenson notes that:

What is missing in this approach, however, is reflection on the changing conditions for historical research when the object of study is the Web, or (as may increasingly be the case) is studied with the Web. (p. 75)

The Internet Archive is described as a legacy system in the sense that it is based on browsing instead of the current trend of searching and in this sense displays aspects of an earlier (web) culture. What is sustained is cyberculture. Cyberculture (1980s-1990s) is characterized by a “commitment to egalitarian and universal access to information” (78). Cyberspace is described as “somewhere else” which is still visible in the IA which prefers browsing over querying. The rise of the blogosphere may be seen as “the rejection of cyberspace” and as a transition phase from cyberculture (egalitarian) to web culture (A-lists). The blogosphere is marked with a strong tension between the idea of egalitarianism and the actual compilation of A-lists by disproportionate linking.

Case study
How to delimit the object of study? DMI asks how the dominant devices do it, for example blogs are defined by the engines as anything that publishes a feed. In this case study the first dominant blogosphere device EatonWeb was taken as a starting point. EatonWeb was a manually created collection (expert-list) of blogs and inclusion was based on the formal characteristic of blogs: reverse-chronological ordered entries. “Of the 947 blogs listed by the directory, 857 (or 85.5%) were present in the Internet Archive.” The missing blogs in the Archive were located by following the outlinks of the blogs in the set. This presents a map of the “whole” early blogosphere.

Contribution
Stevenson contributes to studies on the history of the blogosphere by compiling a new special collection, the Early Blogosphere (according to EatonWeb), that may be mapped and queried. By mapping the outlinks of the blogs in EatonWeb the non-archived blogs (the missing pieces of the archived blogosphere by the Internet Archive) are positioned within the network.

Questions
“The organization of the EatonWeb Portal suggested egalitarianism” which is in line with the characteristics of cyberspace. Are ranking devices the official end of cyberspace? Do you consider EatonWeb in that sense a transitional device?
You have now compiled your own special collection of the early blogosphere. Querying this collection, in contrast to the IA, is now possible. What would you like to ask the collection?
The focus is now on outlinks. Where were these links taken from? The whole page? Suggestion for detailed focus: blogroll analysis only. Do they provide a different map?

Further research
Platform specific maps. Actors receiving links from EatonWeb blogs that are not in the EatonWeb themselves are often blog platforms such as Blogger.com and Pitas.com. Redo map with a focus on platforms. Do platforms cluster?
There are some specific Pitas blogs on the maps, but no specific Blogger.com websites. Is it possible to look “beyond” pitas.com (*.pitas.com) or blogger.com (*.blogger.com) which sites were there?

More info on Michael Stevenson’s & DMI research on the DMI wiki:
Tracing And Mapping The Evolution Of The Early Blogosphere With The Internet Archive
Profiling the Archived Blogosphere
Wayback Web Collections
Early Blog Features

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.

Last month Google announced the launch of their Real Time Search engine. By including real time search results Google has now officially embraced the updatesphere as a subsphere of “The Web,” as may be seen in the following figures.

Fig. 1: Part of the main index

Fig. 2: Updates as a subcategory of index results

Fig. 3: The updatesphere

In my real time web results Google is indexing updates performed within the three popular micro-blogging platforms: Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Notably absent are the status updates from the social networking site Facebook because of its partial walled garden structure. However, it may not be long before these updates will be included as well because Google recently made a deal with Facebook¹. However, it is interesting to note that Google will only receive Facebook updates from public updates on pages (such as fan pages) while competing search engine Bing will receive updates from public profile pages (personal profiles) that are marked as visible for everyone.

Already in 2008 Google started expanding its indexing focus to actions within social networks but the indexed actions were quite messy, for example:

• silvertje has started 0 topics. silvertje has made 1 reply. … silvertje replied on May 13, 2009 06:25 to the question “We want all …”
• Anteek added a contact: Anne Helmond. MyBlogLog Action submitted by Anteek -
• Uploads from Anne Helmond, tagged… – http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvertje/tags/amsterdam/
• Qik | Anne Helmond | Untitled. Streamed by Anne Helmond. More at http://qik.com/silvertje.

These actions performed on social objects² such as Flickr photos, blog posts and videos, seemed to be Google’s first steps into real-time search. By partnering up with Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Twitter, Google has now officially welcomed the updatesphere.

Twitters’ status updates have been included in Google’s index for a while but they are now actively promoted on the main site:

Google Social Search and the statussphere

Please note that this screenshot shows the Social Search experiment, part of Google Labs > Experimental Search. It seems that -while writing- Google removed the real-time social results from the main site and moved it to its Labs.

Status updates are moving from the Web sphere to its own distinct sphere: the updatesphere. Google is acting as a demarcating engine in the construction of the updatesphere.³

1. Google its official partners are: “Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.” Google, Relevance meets the real-time web[↩]
2. social because they the objects are part of social web services that allow other people to participate in the objects by tagging, rating, leaving a comment, embedding or favoring for example[↩]
3. For more on web spheres: R. Rogers, The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. (38p) [pre-print pdf][↩]

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!