Simple instructions to connect to the Eduroam network via Android with your University of Amsterdam credentials. Tested on the Nexus One.

1. Go to Settings > Wireless & networks > Wi-Fi settings
2. Tap Eduroam
3. You get a display with connect settings, please enter the following:
4. EAP method: TTLS
5. Phase 2 authentication:  PAP
6. Identity: yourlogin@uva.nl
7. Wireless password: yourpassword
8. Connect

That’s it! Happy surfing and browsing.

Christian Nold reprogrammed RFID tags taken from discarded OV- chip cards to get discounts in local stores in the Bijlmer. The reprogrammed tags are placed on top of regular bills. Each shop in the Bijlmer has a RFID-reader to scan the note. In this way you can follow where the money has gone in order to discover the local network of this place: a visualized network of the small shops in the Bijlmer.

Bijlmer Euro transactions

It is a network identity currency: The Bijlmer is a both a network internally (comunities) and externally (countries of origin). The aim is to visualize the bijlmer as both an economic and social network. It not only displays the rather abstract transactions when dealing with money but also the tangible relationships. The local value is emphasized as its worth more than a “regular” Euro because of the discount in the local stores. Nold’s ultimate wish is to replace Western Union with this project which starts in April. More info: bijlmereuro.net

Christian Nold

Koert van Mensvoort

Money is one of the oldest virtual realities in our society/culture and points to the deep penetration of the virtual in our society. Reality and authority is underestimated as we are moving from a world of things to a world of info.

In 2006 Ailin Graef became the first virtual real estate millionaire in Second Life with virtual Linden Dollars. In 2009 China put ‘New Limits on Virtual Currency‘ when the virtual economy became so big that China decided to regulate it.

Virtual money is actually a pleonasm as money has always been virtual (except for livestock, physical cattle as currency). Over time currency became smaller and smaller and eventually turned round into coin currency. A big pile of coins led to the invention of bills and from 100 BC the banknote as a form of currrency was accepted. In 1973 the Gold Standard was abandoned which implied that money is now worth X because we tell you it is worth it. While coins that “In God we trust” it actually means “In the government we trust.”

The Currency Fountain by Koert van Mensvoort et al is an installation that translates the virtuality of money into something physical again: water. It aims to display the implicit financial data. “With natural phenonema, like for instance the weather, usually explicit as well as implicit data is available. ” Explicit weather data can be found in weather forecasts and if we look outside we find implicit weather data in the form of a data visualization: clouds, sun, rain etc. “For abstract cultural data, like for instance financial information, the implicit data is missing!” (Van Mensvoort).

Innovation in the financial sector can be found in Africa, in Kenia which has a weak banking structure but over 160 million prepaid cellphones. Prepaid cellphone cards used as money in the form of the M-Pesa. Telecom providers become banks and banks become telephone providers.

In the history of money the signifier becomes the signified followed by a tendency towards the intangible and finally reality is closely lined to authority. The database becomes our reality as our world is starting to consist of info instead of things. In addition to the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life), the noosphere (the sphere of human thought) has emerged. Van Mensvoort compares the ecologies of the rainforest to the financial system and found that the former is stable and the latter shows a rapid growth but both are endangered. The environmental value needs to be monetized by making it explicit. We can love nature but if there is no ownership there is no responsibility. Proposed is the Eco-currency as a currency for environmental value. Depending on the urgency of the environmental crisis the value of the Eco will go up and down. Things that are not in the database (eg nature) do not exist which requires a recultivation of the financial system.

Fluctuation of currency installation

The Institute of Network Cultures launched two online projects at the INC winter drinks: the Theory on Demand series and the audio archive of Geert Lovink 1987-1995. Theory on Demand is a new publication series by the Institute of Network Cultures. The name is derived from print on demand, a printing technology where new copies of a book (or other document) are not printed until an order has been received. Print on Demand publishers includes Lulu, Blurb, and Open Mute. The Theory on Demand mainly focuses on manuscripts that haven’t been published yet and books that are already out of print.

The first books in the series are:
# 1 Dynamics of Critical Internet Culture, by Geert Lovink
# 2 Jahre der Jugend Netzkritik: Essays zu Web 1.0, by Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz
# 3 Victim’s Symptoms, PTSD and Culture, by Ana Peraica
# 4 Imagine There Is No Copyright and Cultural Conglomorates Too…, by Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel

The books can be downloaded as pdf files from the INC website. Printed copies can be ordered with one of the listed print-on- demand publishers.

Geert Lovink’s audio archive contains more than 200 hours digitized material (transferred from cassettes to audio files). The archive contains editions from the Bilwet Portrait gallery and various other interviews and lectures from 1987 – 1995. For information about the Bilwet Portrait gallery please visit the Bilwet/Agentur Bilwet/Adilkno archive.

(txt by INC)

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.