#ttw13

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New Post has been published on http://www.shanetilton.com/2013/03/06/infostructure-of-knowledge-response-for-ttw13/

"Infostructure of Knowledge" Response for #TtW13

This weekend, I was asked to moderate a panel at the Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW13) in New York City. During this time, I had to write down the key points of the panel and post them on Twitter. In addition, I wanted to respond to the panelist points and add some analysis to the work. Like most great panels, this one ran long. I only had a few short minutes to take some questions from the digital floor. So, I want to use this format to provide some sort of response to the panelists.

Bonnie Stewart began the panel with her discussion titled “MOOCs are Not the Enemy: Networked, Non-Imperialist MOOC Models,” which was framed under the following question “are MOOCs the future of higher education?” MOOCs are Massive Open Online Courses I thought she did a great job tying some of the criticism about the platform and used strong visuals to support the popular theme that MOOCs are disrupting the status quo of education. This revolution of online education represents a sense of academic colonialism, imperialism & predatory privatization, which is the fear of higher education professionals within the traditional “brick and mortar” realm of the academy. The elements that get lost in the discussion is the different “flavors” of MOOCs. The questions that always gets stuck in my mind when thinking about MOOCs is the structural support needed to run a class of this nature. Stewart makes the point about the key word of MOOCs is open not massive. She refers to the openness of knowledge. My point would be that it also needs to include the openness of support of the student. There needs to be technical support (IT department), academic support (tutoring) & great peer support (groups outside the MOOC environment) in order for the class to work. Stewart does a great job describe the meta-model of education (the old myth of the blind men touching the elephant & describing it) and trying to tie in the utopia mindset of the MOOC while at the same time describing the reality of the state of online education. This current state is framed under the themes of academic hierarchy, globalization, venture capital & data surveillance, which represents parts of the MOOCs structure.

Daniel Greene followed Bonnie with his talk “‘Do We Have A Sign That Says ‘Weirdos Welcome?’: Urban Libraries and the Control of Access,” which was an interesting ethnographic style study on the urban library being the center-point of not knowledge but social interaction between the different stakeholders of the system. One of the early keypoints that Greene addressed was the fact that libraries has lots of issues in order to address Internet access, mentioning the fact the poor of under-classed use the library not as a center of knowledge but as a refuge from the elements as the shelter closes for the day and the homeless make make their way into the city. This image of the poor hold up in the building presents a confliction to Greene’s point about the librarians and other library staff adding to the role of production in the USA, where the library is the knowledge center of the community and responsible for the training of productive member of society. The conflict between library schools vs. i-schools speaks to this change as both schools have different philosophies in terms of changes the norm of the librarians’ job & interactions within the library. For the most part, I found Greene’s ethnographic narrative on urban librarians and patrons engaging especially his discussion of the “two ends of the [digital] chain gang” as it relates not just to the librarians in DC but the exploited workers in Foxconn. However, I disagree with his analysis of the issues related to the “digital divide.” For the most part, Greene is overinflating the connection between digital divide as access. The digital divide issue represents not just access as the generic, but skill sets related to using technology, the willingness to use technology, the ‘roads and nodes’ and the personal connection and access to mobile and other portable forms of communication technology. To shortcut the discussion to describe it as ‘politics of access’ or ‘social relations in 2013′ without the theory and support of the digital divide lit would leave out the issues in rural environments related to a connection populace.

In perhaps the most relevant talk to the conference, R. Stuart Geiger gave a presentation called “Values Where? Interrogating Client-Side Scripting as a Design Process,” which dealt with the use of bots and how the creation of those bots represents more than the code needed to create them. Bots were embedded in the Twitterstream for the conference, making it hard to separate the signal from the noise. Stuart created a spambot Twitter account related to the conference to point out the amount of spam that was on the hashtag feed in relationship to the people participating in the dialogue related to the themes of the conference. One of the key takeaway from Geiger’s talk was the point about an algorithm used to create the bots is not just code but represents a policy and infrastructure of the organization. Geiger used the example of the YouTube takedown notices, which are bot-driven and are counter to the spambots on Twitter. YouTube bots represent that “standard operating practices” of YouTube in terms of acceptable content and mark the policy of the company. Spambots are a “bottom-up” mode of code, which represents a marketing practice more than anything else. Geiger ties up his time by borrowing Lessig’s adage that “code looks a lot like law.” Geiger makes his points through the use of memes and cultural products. I wish he would have extended his line of thinking to “code as dialogue” between company and user between he was on solid theoretical ground, but he was out of time.

Digital pioneers and theorists like John Perry Barlow, Howard Rheingold and Kevin Kelly argued since the 70’s that digital media is emancipatory. One of the targets of this liberation would be the ossified corporate and state hierarchies of mainstream society. Their vision was that of direct peer to peer communication, rather than one to many broadcasts. This they thought will usher in if not total equality, a community of peers, while others put an emphasis on new media's meritocratic potential. 

Over the years these ideas were embodied in protocols, digital tools and found its way into business and in particular social media marketing discourse. In 2006 Jay Rosen confidently asserted that power had shifted, now we have writing readers and audiences with cameras. To the criticism of who would listen if everybody is a speaker he retorted - the “...people formerly known as the audience do not believe... ‘too many speakers!’ is our problem”. Recently talk of the amateur and hierarchy-less power of digital media reached a new apogee during the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement. The apparent leaderless nature of the uprisings and protests were noted. The network it was said had subverted the hierarchy.

But at the same time the very democratic nature of networked digital media production is producing an abundance of content. Unlike print, radio and TV the economics of creating and delivering digital content means that there is an ever increasing amount of it. Attention however remains finite. In this attention economy a wealth of information has created a scarcity of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently. 

This allocation is being done today by the increasing use of algorithmic filters in digital tools that allow users to see relevant content (and the producers of content). To achieve this relevance these filters often rely on social and interest graphs and on new measures of popularity that is often confused with merit. 

One result of this has been a significant change in an key affordance for most new services. Services like Twitter do not require reciprocal ‘following’. This allows users to allocate their attention in a more individual and efficient way.  It allows some individuals to follow very little people, while being followed by thousands. Connection numbers has suddenly become far more significant.

Today a very visible part of online profiles is the display of following - follower numbers. Because users can be followed by many, but don’t have to follow back (and vice versa) these numbers are said by the marketing and software industry to embody influence, and tools like Klout has been built to try measure this influence.

In reality though it is more complex. These profile metrics embody a hitherto unknown hybrid of potential-to-reach and social status at the same time. And while the internet’s promise was that of a meritocracy, often these follower following numbers reflect unearned ascribed status. What's more the very public nature of these numbers make them impossible to ignore. And there is evidence of these profile reach/ status signs are augmenting our reality (to use Nathan Jurgenson's phrase) - having real world effects. 

This paper will show whether through user experience design, developers are indeed creating these new inequalities described.

What is this inequality? I will try and unpack the relationship between the potential to command attention (reach), and social status, to what extent the one can be parlay'd into the other?

I will ask if these new social status systems are even more overt and total that other signifiers of status - like brands and clothes.

It will ask how are these new status and reach systems - which are often exposed universally as open API’s - used by companies to promote some users and obscure others?

I will look at what advantages and problems can accrue to individuals that acquire a lot of this potential reach / status, and what are the downside to being left behind?

And I will ask whether this very visible inequality in status and ability to command attention might not negatively impact the other digital utopian credos: like the sense community, authenticity, interactivity, peer to peer production and perceptions of individual self worth.

Theorizing the Web: #TtW2013 March 1-2, 2013 // The Graduate Center // CUNY