Digital In/Justice
I want to recommend a new post at Culture Digitally, “Digital In/Justice,” both because it may be of interest to the readers of this blog, and because it features Microsoft Research’s Mary Gray. Culture Digitally arranges occasional dialogues, in which two or more scholars go back and forth in conversation on a topic they are just working out in their own mind. It’s meant as a chance to make visible the raw development of ideas, unpolished and engaging. In this one, Mary Gray and Nick Couldry (King’s College, London) tried to develop their idea of “digital injustice,” offering an opportunity to rethink issues like the digital divide, equitable access, voice and opportunity, and the institutional environment necessary for such issues of equity to be addressed and protected. It is at once philosophical and quite personal, and I hope those of you who want new ways to think about digital media and the ethics of public participation will find intriguing ideas in it.
For instance, here’s a tiny clip, a comment by Mary:
Yes, cutting off access to an individual’s capacity to contribute to cultural dialogue and deliberation is, arguably, a case of injustice. But this formulation presumes or, at least, prioritizes individual autonomy and agency as the (pre-public/pre-mediated?) source of voice. If negotiation and articulation of the self are collective acts… then the greater injustice is not the loss of individual access to media as sites of personal narrative and expression. The more pressing injustice is that such a loss forecloses the use of media as processes of contribution, deliberation, contestation, and play in the social construction of the self — from the well of possibilities of a future articulation of self. Simply put, I’m interested in prioritizing information and technology access as a precious cultural resource…
And one from Nick, later in the conversation:
Is this where privatized conditions of digital discourse… bite most, in undercutting the common spaces of debate where claims of social injustice might be made, heard and recognised, and by distributing unequally access to the discursive resources that enable some to command general attention? If so, then I would like to add to your interesting conception of digital media as a ‘space of possibles’ the idea that such a space must allow to be heard and registered claims for the redistribution of ‘actuals’.
“Socially Mediated Publicness”: an open-access issue of JOBEM
I love being a scholar, but one thing that really depresses me about research is that so much of what scholars produce is rendered inaccessible to so many people who might find it valuable, inspiring, or thought-provoking. This is at the root of what drives my commitment to open-access. When Zizi Papacharissi asked Nancy Baym and I if we’d be willing to guest edit the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (JOBEM), we agreed under one condition: the issue had to be open-access (OA). Much to our surprise and delight, Taylor and Francis agreed to “test” that strange and peculiar OA phenomenon by allowing us to make this issue OA.
Nancy and I decided to organize the special issue around “socially mediated publicness,” both because we find that topic to be of great interest and because we felt like there was something fun about talking about publicness in truly public form. We weren’t sure what the response to our call would be, but were overwhelmed with phenomenal submissions and had to reject many interesting articles.
But we are completely delighted to publish a collection of articles that we think are timely, interesting, insightful, and downright awesome. If you would like to get a sense of the arguments made in these articles, make sure to check out our introduction. The seven pieces in this guest-edited issue of JOBEM are:
- “Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction” by Nancy Baym and danah boyd
- “Knock, Knock. Who’s There? The Imagined Audience” by Eden Litt
- “Facework on Facebook: The Online Publicness of Juvenile Delinquents and Youths-at-Risk” by Sun Sun Lim, Shobha Vadrevu, Yoke Hian Chan & Iccha Basnyat
- “The Digital Storyteller’s Stage: Queer Everyday Activists Negotiating Privacy and Publicness” by Sonja Vivienne & Jean Burgess
- “‘There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!’ Negotiating Visibility on Facebook Memorial Pages” by Alice Marwick & Nicole B. Ellison
- “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves: The Contentious Role of Women in the New Gaming Public” by Anastasia Salter & Bridget Blodgett
- “Secretly Political: Civic Engagement in Online Publics in Kazakhstan” by Irina Shklovski & Bjarki Valtysson
We hope that you’ll find them fun to read and that you’ll share them with others that might enjoy them too!
Panel discussion on the #YoSoy132: Mexico’s Networked Social Movement – Sep 20, 5pm at the NERD Center
In collaboration with the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, Microsoft Research New England is hosting a discussion about the #YoSoy132 activist movement. Open to the public.
What: #YoSoy132: Mexico’s Networked Social Movement
When: Thursday September 20 at 5:00 PM
Where: Microsoft Conference Center (Barton Room) located at One Memorial Drive, First Floor, Cambridge, MA
Photo: (c) Omar Torres/AFP/Getty
Abstract
The role of social media in movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street has been much discussed, and such “hashtagged” social movements continue to appear in multiple latitudes. The panelists will discuss the development of the #YoSoy132 movement, “I am 132″ in English, an ongoing student-led activist group that fights for democracy and against media bias in an apparent attempt to impose the next president of Mexico during the recent 2012 general election. The movement embodies the collision between centralized traditional media and distributed social media, and reveals the limitations of social media in reaching beyond those who are already networked. The panelists include a member of the #YoSoy132 and researchers investigating networked social movements.
Bios
Sasha Costanza-Chock is a researcher and mediamaker who works on civic media, the political economy of communication, and collaborative design for media justice and communication rights. He is Assistant Professor of Civic Media at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, Co-PI of the Center for Civic Media, and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Sasha has been a part of the Independent Media Center network, the Allied Media Conference, and VozMob, among other projects. For more info see http://schock.cc. Twitter: @schock
Antonio Attolini Murra is a student at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México majoring in political science and international relations and the spokesperson of his university’s Local Assembly in the student movement #YoSoy132. He has participated in several conferences about transnational organized crime and political reforms in Mexico. In 2011, he was elected Secretary General of his university’s Model of United Nations. He writes in his school’s newspaper, specialized publications, and online news portals such as Animal Político and ADN Político. Antonio is an avid social media user and blogs at http://antonioattolini.blogspot.com Twitter: @antonioattolini
Mayo Fuster Morell does action research in the field of social movements (Global Justice Movement, Free Culture Movement, and recent mobilization wave of “Indignados” in Spain), online collaborative communities, and, public policies. Mayo concluded her PhD at the European University Institute, and published a book on the influence of Free Culture Movement for the emergence of 15M/Indignados mobilization in Spain. She is currently a fellow at the Berkman center for Internet and Society, a researcher at the Institute of Government and Public Policies (Autonomous University of Barcelona), and a member of the Internet and policy steering committee of the European Council of Political Research. As part of her academic work, she is a promoter of Networked Politics collaborative action research, and the International Forum on Building Digital Commons. For more info see: http://www.onlinecreation.info Twitter: @Lilaroja
Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a social computing researcher at Microsoft Research and an affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His research focuses on the design and study of social media systems that support collaboration for creative expression and civic engagement. His current research looks at the use of social media in crises, such as in the Mexican Drug War. Andrés’ work has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, and Wired. Andrés holds a PhD and a Masters from the MIT Media Lab, and a Bachelor’s from Tecnológico de Monterrey. For more info see: http://andresmh.com. Twitter: @andresmh
Arrival Guidance
Upon arrival at One Memorial Drive, kindly approach the Lobby Floor Security Desk; identity yourself, show your picture ID and sign the Building Visitor Log.
Turn This into That: a Remixing Experiment
Two sides of social production: crowdsourcing and remixing
Networked technologies have facilitated two forms of social production: remixing and crowdsourcing. Remixing has been typically associated with creative, expressive, and unconstrained work such as the creation of video mashups or funny image macros that we often see on social media websites. Crowdsourcing, on the other hand, has been associated with large-scale mechanical work, like labeling images or transcribing audio, performed as microtasks on services like Amazon Mechanical Turk. So the stereotype is that remixing is playful, creative, expressive, but undirected and often chaotic, while crowdsourcing is useful to achieve actual work but it is monotonous, and requires (small) financial incentives.
Crowdsoucing Creativity: “Mixsourcing”
The space between remixing and crowdsourcing has partially been explored. For example, one could argue that Wikipedia exists in a unique space in between these two ideas as it relies on some, albeit small, degree of human creativity, requires no financial incentives, and leverages large numbers of contributors who are encouraged to tweak one another’s submissions. However, Wikipedia’s texts are mainly functional, purposely devoid of any personal expressiveness, and constrained by the task at hand.
On the more creative end of the spectrum, artists have explored the use of crowdsourcing, such as the Johnny Cash Project and the Sheep Market, and researchers have evaluated the uses of creative crowdsourcing for design. We wondered then, if there is a way to create a generic platform to perform creative and artistic work in a more directed, crowdsourcing-like way, some kind of “bounded creativity,” which we called “mixsourcing.”
The mixsourcing of a “Moonicorn”
We decided to play with this idea of mixsourcing through an exercise that involved giving people a creative, yet directed task. The exercise consisted first in creating a novel piece of content, an image, to serve as a creative seed and then ask specific people, using plain old e-mail, to turn it into something else, i.e., to remix it. The task was specifically crafted for each individual based on their interests, which we knew through pre-existing personal relationships with them.
The seed content used in this first exercise was an image, hand-drawn by one of the researchers, showing of a unicorn with a moon as a head. We sent the email to a group of friends, appealing to their social relationship as a group and with one of the researchers; each person was offered a task: an invitation to turn the “moonicorn” into something based on what we knew they were good at:
“Hello my dear friends! [...] I’m writing to see if you can help me with my summer project [...] I gave you all top secret assignments below. If you can help, it would mean so so so so so much to me. You don’t have to spend a ton of time on it. And I’ll throw a boozy thanks-you party next week when I’m in town. I couldn’t ask for a better lump of friends. Much love from the west coast.
This is my moonicorn:
Jables: please create a moonicorn cocktail recipe.
Celia: please create an iPhone video documenting the rare, nut-eating moonicorn, played by @Ian
[...]
Jables not only created his moonicorn cocktail, he also prepared one, took a picture of it, and emailed a make-believe recipe to accompany the beverage:
The Sanguine Moonicorn
6oz Fresh Moonicorn Blood.
1oz Pure Moonicorn Tears [hold for virgins]
Topped with Moonicorn Sweetbreads, Moonicorn Gonad, Moon Cheese, and an olive.
Cleansed by fire and served over ice, with a Moonicorn Jerky Moon Dagger.
Celia and Ian also completed their collaborative task and produced a short video. Similarly, we received remixes in the form of a fiction article, a felt toy, and a music mix. Here is a collage of all the remixes people produced:
The moonicorn experiment was quite successful, as more than half of the people actually completed their remix. A lot of them spent quite a bit of time on it and were very keen on narrating their creative process as much as they were in sharing their finished work.
Subsequently, we decided to recreate a similar exercise on a larger scale. This failed, however. We used a school mailing list and a group on Facebook, but both failed to attract many participants. The message in both cases did not include personalized tasks and the groups included many strangers. Hence, we hypothesized that there were three key attributes for the success of the first experiment:
- Pre-existing personal relationships.
- Well-crafted, personalized tasks directed at specific individuals, compared to the diffusion of responsibilities, well-described in the social psychology literature.
- Detailed tasks. The messages to broader group were to open putting a burden of choosing on the remixers.
Turn This Into That
Using the insights gained from the previous exercises, we began to envision a mixsourcing platform to enable people to create and participate in remixing exchanges like the moonicorn one.
We called the platform “Turn This Into That,” as it describes the system’s premise.
To convey the spirit of the social relationships that we thought were instrumental to the success of the first exercise, we decided to build the system on a postcard metaphor.
People can send postcards challenging one another to turn something into something else, and the responses themselves can also be thought of as postcards. Furthermore, given the interest people showed in talking about their process the submissions provide space and encouragement for people to address the whys and the hows of their challenges and their remixes. Also, the challenges are specific in terms of what the remix should be, a photo for example, yet it leaves the choice of what to do up to the remixer.
Practically speaking, we aimed for this platform to merely be the embodiment of a mechanism to provide creative sparks, playfulness, and interactions among people without actually having to deal with the complexities of creating tools or even repositories for the content itself. Our system would rely completely on the social media ecosystem for all that, and Turn This Into That would create the linkages.
Before implementing the actual system we built a semi-functional prototype, and we would like to invite you to use it and give us feedback.
—-
Turn This into That is a project by FUSE Lab‘s intern Sarah Hallacher, in collaboration with Jenny Rodenhouse and Andrés Monroy-Hernández.
Cross-posted at FUSE Labs blog
Can objects be evil? A review of “Addiction by Design”
Bliss by Sean O’Brien
Schüll, Natasha Dow. (2012) Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Addiction by Design is a nonfiction page-turner. A richly detailed account of the particulars of video gaming addiction, worth reading for the excellence of the ethnographic narrative alone, it is also an empirically rigorous examination of users, designers, and objects that deepens practical and philosophical questions about the capacities of players interacting with machines designed to entrance them. Many books that make worthy contributions to the theoretical literature of a particular field are slogs to read. Addiction by Design is as compelling as a horror story—a sad, smart horror story that calls off the Luddite witch hunt (Down with the machines!) in favor of an approach that examines the role of gaming designers within existing social systems of gender and class disparity.
The most popular gaming machines serve up video slots and video poker. They run on paycards because inserting cash and coinage slows down the rate of play, compromising the experience. By the mid-1990s in Las Vegas, Schüll reports, the vast majority of people at Gamblers Anonymous meetings were addicted to machines—not the table games, ponies, or lotteries previously associated with problem gambling. In 2003 it was estimated that 85 percent of industry profits nationally came from video gaming. For the people (mostly women) who become addicts, the draw of the machines has little to do with the possibility of winning big. Problem gamblers are attracted to the machines because they offer portals to an appealing parallel universe in which they can disconnect from the anxieties and pressures of everyday life. One of Schüll’s interviewees, Mollie, explains, “It’s like being in the eye of a storm, is how I’d describe it. Your vision is clear on the machine in front of you but the whole world is spinning around you, and you can’t really hear anything. You aren’t really there—you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with.”
Woman playing video slots, 2010, Copyright Kate Krueger
Mollie’s experience is typical in at least two ways. First, she has a traumatic past that predisposes her to addictive behaviors. Second, she repeatedly spends all that she has in binges. But before we blame Mollie and other victims and then expound the benefits of 12-step programs with earnest optimism, Schüll asks readers to consider the insidious dependencies that arise between machine designers, casino owners, and gamblers, especially “problem gamblers,” whose struggle to control personal spending generates 30 to 60 percent of casino revenue. Schüll’s Addiction systematically builds on her basic argument that, “just as certain individuals are more vulnerable to addiction than others, it is also the case that some objects, by virtue of their unique pharmacologic or structural characteristics, are more likely than others to trigger or accelerate an addiction.”
Schüll describes the progression of changes the industry has introduced in search of higher profits. For a while, ergonomics was economics. Then high-priced animators were hired to design pleasing sounds and animations to reward winners. But some players were annoyed that the animations were too slow, so the animations were dropped. Play sped up. Faster play was great for increasing dopamine delivery to the brain. It also tended to speed players toward the end of their credits, which lowered their loyalty to particular machines and the casinos that housed them. Chip-driven gaming allowed designers to respond to this problem by tweaking the programs so that frequent small wins (often less than the cost of playing a single hand) kept dopamine surging while players’ cash trickled steadily into casino coffers. One player in a gambling support group compared video machines to crack cocaine, a comparison frequently repeated by researchers and psychologists.[1] By some accounts, the recidivism rate is now higher for gambling than for any other addiction.
The demons here are not the machines, though they are manifest in the machines. The demons are not the people who design the machines nor the people who build palaces in which the machines are arrayed in blinking, burbling gardens of vertiginous electronica. The demons are not located in the players’ genes or childhoods. The demons are not the state regulators who now embrace video gaming after corralling it on American Indian reservations for decades. There is no single devil here, and no particular exorcism can right the wrong, but there is something devilish about the way designers’ intentions and users’ neurology meet up to make video gaming so devastating for some and so profitable for others.
[1] Mary Sojourner, She Bets Her Life: A True Story of Gambling Addiction (New York: Seal Books, 2010).
This review is cross-posted at publicbooks.org, a new book review and visual essay website affiliated with Public Culture, a peer-reviewed academic journal.
SMC seeks a Research Assistant
Call for Research Assistant
Microsoft Research (MSR) is looking for a Research Assistant for its Social Media Collective in the New England lab, based in Cambridge,Massachusetts. The Social Media Collective consists of Nancy Baym, danah boyd, Kate Crawford, Megan Finn, and Mary L. Gray, as well as faculty visitors and Ph.D. interns. An appropriate candidate will be both passionate and knowledgeable about social media, have strong writing and organization skills, and have experience working on research projects. Minimal qualifications are a BA or equivalent degree in a social science discipline and some qualitative research training.
Job responsibilities will include producing literature reviews, coding ethnographic data, editing manuscripts, and organizing events. The RA will also get to collaborate on ongoing research and, while publication is not a guarantee, the RA will be encouraged to co-author papers while at MSR. The RAship will require 40 hours per week on site in Cambridge, MA. It is a 1-year only contractor position, paid hourly with flexible daytime hours. The start date will likely be in September.
This position is ideal for scholars who are applying to PhD programs in Communication, Media Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Information Studies, and related fields who want to get involved with research before entering a graduate program. Current New England-based MA/PhD students are welcome to apply provided they can commit to 40 hours of on-site work per week.
To apply, please send an email to Nancy Baym (baym@microsoft.com) with the subject “RA Application” and include the following:
- 1-page personal statement, including a description of research experience, interests, and professional goals
- CV or resume
- Writing sample (preferably a literature review or a scholarly-styled article)
- Links to online presence (e.g., blog, homepage, Twitter, journalistic endeavors, etc.)
- The names and emails of two recommenders
We will begin reviewing applications on September 11 and continue doing so until we find an appropriate candidate.
Book club digest: Networked
At SMC, we regularly meet to discuss interesting books in our field. These discussions tend to spark conversations about a variety of related topics. In an effort to be more inclusive, we thought we’d share the questions that our conversation sparked in the hopes that the SMC community would share your thoughts about these issues in the comments!
Book: Networked: The New Social Operating System Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, MIT Press 2012
This book is intended for an audience that includes sociologists, but also interested members of the broader public. As such, there is an interesting combination of descriptions of different sociological heuristics, particularly the corrective concept of “networked individual,” and more popular concepts such as the “Facebook generation.” Networked brings much data to bear against dystopian ideas that the internet isolates people, or that the online world and offline world are separate spheres of social activity. Most evidence rallied in the book draws on survey data from the Pew research group run by Rainie, and Wellman’s NetLab research group at University of Toronto. Wellman’s research from pre-web/pre-Facebook times, and the longitudinal data from Pew researchers describe shifts in early internet social practices to the present.
Here are some discussion questions that generated a great conversation:
- How can researchers best represent a body of work with multiple authors?
- What social work do people do to make and keep ties today, and what work did people do in “in the village”? Do networked individuals require networked digital technologies? Emma Rothschild’s book, The Inner Life of Empires, describes the work of maintaining complex social ties in the eighteenth century and raised the following questions for us: When did networked individualism start?
- In a book intended for a popular audience, how can researchers entice readers to attend to the details of the data and how that data was collected? How do researchers demonstrate expertise while also describing some of the messiness of data collection?
- How can class, race and, more generally, identity be brought into discussions of networked individuals? A point on which we all agreed is that we need to consider and better understand how social identities might constrain people’s ability to expand networks, to move across networks, and to reap the benefits of networked individualism that Rainie and Wellman celebrate. What constraints are there on the kinds of mobility and access to resources expanded and mobile social networks can offer?
