Part 1: Mapping E-Culture

I contributed three pieces to this part:

1. Mapping E-culture: Alex Adriaanssens, based on interview with Anne Helmond – The Chinese Dream (PDF)
2. Mapping E-culture: Anne Nigten, by Anne Helmond – Patching Zone (PDF)
3. Mapping E-culture: Henk Borgdorff (based on interview with Anne Helmond) Practice-based Research in the Arts (PDF)

Part 2: Navigating E-culture

Part 3: Walled Garden

In the Artist Presentation article (PDF) the Twitter conversation between Mez Breeze (Augmentology) and silvertje (Anne Helmond) at the Walled Garden conference in 2008 was published.

The E-culture book (2009) by Virtueel Platform has been licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license.

On Monday 18 May 2009 in Amsterdam Virtueel Platform organized Archive 2020, an international event on the archiving of born digital cultural content. Born digital content describes digital materials that originated in the digital realm, and have no print or analog counterpart. (see full project description)

Virtueel Platform bought second hand diskette disks at Marktplaats and transformed them into name badges. I received a badge with a Windows 3.1 installation disk part 1 which I will never be able to use because I don’t own any equipment with a diskette drive and I don’t have the other disks. The problems archives are facing are addressed before coffee is being served.

Annet Dekker opens the Archive 2020 expert meeting with the remark that Virtueel Platform was slightly surprised that archiving is still hot. Recent publications about the topic point to the urgency of archiving in the case of Australia’s online history ‘facing extinction.’ The Wired article on ‘Forget Storage, If You Want Files to Last Try Movage’ includes Kevin Kelly’s somewhat poetic approach to archiving which he describes as “in, out, in, out. Copy, move, copy, move.”

The title of the event refers to two things:

1. The archive as potentially envisioned in 2020. This includes the idea that 2020 is just a year and that the internet as we know it will not be there anymore.
2. 20/20 also means perfect vision: archives are looking for a perfect vision.

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.