Wikipedia CPoV Conference

Geert Lovink

Patrick Lichty (USA)

Johanna Niesyto (DE) and Mayo Fuster Morell (IT)

Ramón Reichert (AU)

Stuart Geiger (USA)

Q&A

More Wikipedia CPoV Conference photos on Flickr.

Walled Garden is an international working conference that took place in the Lloyd Hotel, Amsterdam on the 20th and 21st of November 2008. The Digital Methods Initiative participated in the session titled Mapping the Walled Gardens: Digital methods for researching and visualizing networks on the Web, moderated by Sabine Niederer and Richard Rogers.

“What happens when we have friended our old friends on MySpace and have written professional testimonials on LinkedIn, have scrobbled our entire music libraries on last.fm and have written on many walls on Facebook? Can networks be open, sustainable and valuable? Or does a network only work when it’s a walled garden?” (Sabine Niederer, Institute of Network Cultures)

The following blog post consists of notes from our discussions during day one.

The ontology of walled gardens
What are the features of the spaces we consider to be walled gardens?

• They have entrances and exits, these may or may not be protected. You come inside which has a gardener’s mentality, the gardeners tend the content to make sure there are no weeds and trash. These tenders of the walled gardens may be people (moderators) or software (bots/limited fields/frameworks).
• The control is at the gate (this is an ideal/typical situation). A walled garden is considered to be a secure space or a safe haven. At the same time they give you a sense of danger and fear when you leave… “are you sure you want to leave?”
• Prevent cross-fertilization, every walled garden has a template/layout.

Walled Garden associations
Offline equivalents of the walled garden may be the gated communities and planned towns. Where is the term used? When you apply it to the web it’s an industry term located in the field of consumer electronics and online platforms.

Simple analysis: which of these platforms is mostly associated with the term walled garden? For example: Query “Walled garden” + Facebook

99,900 Facebook
53,300 AOL
50,700 MySpace
18,700 LinkedIn

Permeability
The dominant walled garden type is semi-permeable. What’s permeable and what’s not? The share or ShareThis button seems to be about planting your seeds (content) somewhere else. The future of the walled garden is to expand it and to allow for the space itself to be able to grow. APIs and widgets allow the planting of seeds outside the garden. What happens to the walled gardens? Can we see them as some kind of irrigation system? APIs are part of the ecosystem of the walled garden, however these biotropes are (tightly) controlled ecosystems. In these mini ecosystems. walled gardens need to be fed.

Sustainability
How does a core come into being these days? How do they emerge and how are they sustained? How can we measure the sustainability of a walled garden? In order to sustain itself it needs to be personalized. In the case of the Obama websites and web 2.0 services the distance is shortening because of the quantity of links.

Privacy
The walled garden is creating the sense/appearance of safety with personal privacy settings. What are the ideal settings for your feeling private and how would one simulate that? Even though walled gardens give the sense of safety, that nothing will escape we can see leaky databodies. Idea: create a leaky profile event alert. This idea has been realized in a project titled the Leaky Garden Project, for more info see Erik Borra’s post on leakygarden.net: data ‘leakage’ of web2.0 services.

How many people lock their accounts? How do the social networking sites position themselves, or how are they being positioned in the privacy debate? In the case of politics and activism all protest activity is about its own management. This is why most of the action is about the inside, about the “walled gardenness”. A lot of the activism itself thus also takes place within the walled garden itself that is being critiqued.

At the end of day one we came up with three potential projects, dealing with the following topics/questions:

1. Term association/why.
2. State of the art of walled gardens with its semi-permeability and root system and feeds.
3. The privacy. Which space gives the sense of the most safety and the complexity of privacy.

Blog08 Special II from Sacha Post on Vimeo.

One of my personal highlights is that Diggnation will be recording live from the Next Web in Amsterdam. The show will be streamed live at the Next Web blog and at revision3. Enjoy!

Klamer gave up on PowerPoint a long time ago because the flip-over has several advantages over Powerpoint: You can keep referring to it and you can draw and add notes while you are speaking to clarify things. This makes it a superior technique that is very effective. Presenters often read off the PowerPoint which not only makes it a very boring presentation but it also makes people feel stupid because they can read themselves. Klamer gives us a live demonstration of the advantages of another “old forgotten” presentation technique: the overhead projector. This old presentation technique immediately causes some problems because the right sheets and pens are initially lost.

Arjo Klamer is professor of the Economics of Art and Culture at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and holds the world’s only chair in the field of cultural economics (from klamer.nl). This chair has changed dramatically over the years as there used to be an enormous gap between economics and culture. Economics was a suspicious subject especially when you were critical of government subsidies. Nowadays more and more people in the world of the arts have adopted the language of economists but Klamer thinks this adoptation has gone too far. We are now thinking too much in economic terms. If you deal with cultural goods, goods with a symbolic value, then the market is not the most appropriate space to realize them.

The connection between economics and culture is now understood by politicians, both left-wing and right-wing who have discovered the power of culture. This insight is completely new but has a lot of consequences. Richard Florida explored this shift in “The Rise of the Creative Class” where he describes the role of the creative class in the urban regeneration. Florida places creativity in the center of the new economy. We no longer live in an information economy but in a creative economy. (The guy who is setting next to me writes down “NO MORE FLORIDA!” but unfortunately I never find out why.)

We are currently very worried that outsourcing our labor processes to China will influence our economy but we must keep in mind that the actual production is only a fraction of the cost. What we really pay for is the idea, the image and the symbolic value. We pay for the experience and the the symbolic value that is attached to it.

Klamer explores the great divide between economics and culture. How do we transfer the creativity to the business world? Not only are the values different, the rhetoric and the way people talk are also different. How to we translate the rhetoric and bridge the gap? The problem is that we place the logic of the government against the logic of the market with its demand and result-oriented approach.

We need a third sphere where art gets realized which Klamer refers to as “the oikos” (Greek for: fireplace, the law of the household). This sphere has its own logic which we take into other spheres. This third sphere is a social space that might be a critical sphere. The third sphere, the creative commons, requires and depends on contributions. The logic of the third sphere is the logic of reciprocity. Another name for this sphere is the creative commons in which we can also place the web, open-source software and its community. Klamer states the Internet arose in the logic of the creative commons.
This is where I disagree with Arjo Klamer.

In my view the Internet arose in the logic of the government because the ARPANET was developed by the United States Department of Defense. The ARPANET, as predecessor of the Internet, was developed in close connection with researchers at universities but all the terminals were sponsored by ARPA. In the late eighties the Internet shifted from the logic of the government to the logic of the market when the first Internet Service providers were formed. (History of the Internet).

The Internet is not as open and democratic as is presented by Klamer. Alexander Galloway described in ‘Protocol’ how the Internet is both radically distributed and highly controlled. According to Klamer we can take the logic of the third sphere into the other spheres. Has the web shifted from the logic of the government to the logic of the market to the logic of the oikos? If we choose to place the web within the logic of the oikos than we must keep in mind that it is still tightly bound to the logic of the market. The Internet still resides in all the spheres with their own logic. We must not place things in a linear way but rather use Foucault’s concept of genealogy.

Arjo Klamer is currently involved in setting up a university in the third sphere. The Academia Vitae is an institution that reflects on the divide between economics and culture. It also acts on the divide with firms that pay for the student’s Master degree. It uses the logic of the third sphere where the reciprocity is that students have a (paid) graduation project and firms receive projects. There is a focus on how the students can use their creativity without losing their own integrity. In order to stay in the third sphere you need to retain your own authenticity and integrity without going into the spectacle.