Category Archives: internet

internet of things conference @ HUMlab

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HUMlab will be hosting another exciting conference in December (8-9): “Critically Making the Internet of Things”. The speaker list is impressive: Johanna Drucker, Lisa Gitelman, Finn Arne Jørgensen, Martijn de Waal, Johanna Björklund, David Zahle, Mash, Haibo Li, Chris Speed, Bruce Sterling, Tim Hutchings, Anne Galloway, Molly Steenson, Matt Ratto, Christian Lindholm, Eric Carlsson (please find more information on the speakers on the conference website).

Besides talks there will be an art performance, workshops, and a visit to the new Umeå Arts campus (where the new HUMlab X will be located). These are issues to be addressed at the conference, according to the conf. website:

The conference will present world-class researchers, entrepreneurs, and artists for a critical and engaging exmination of ideas for a world where everything is assumed to be connected, where objects such as cars and roads communicate and where the digital has moved outside of the computer. A basic notion underpinning the conference is the transition from online computers to online things. Examples of relevant issues include; How do we build smart cities? What are the implications of the recording of our movements by GPS devices, sensors and security cameras? What do connected objects actually say to each other, and can we describe their media ecology? Can we better understand the dream of a connected world through media history? How do we design products, services and systems for such a world? What is urban computing? What is a sentient city? How is farming changed when cattle are equipped with RFID-tags and become subject to national supervision?

Internet & Society/ Berlin

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The second event I attended, just last week, was the Inauguration Symposium of the “Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society” – also referred to as the Google Institute or Google-financed Institute (see its mission statement here). Even though I was a little skeptical at first, given the fact that Google sponsored both the Institute and the event, I greatly enjoyed the symposium! The first thing I realized when checking in was that a lot of technology would be involved in the conference.

The most stunning piece of technology was table cards with our names on them, but also QR codes identifying our profiles (we all had set up before going to Berlin). Whenever someone from the audience wanted to contribute something the QR code was scanned and the profile of the person was displayed on a screen (guess Patrik Svensson, director of HUMlab, would have loved this!). Right next to this screen was an even bigger screen showing the slides and an extended flip chart with a piece of paper on it – this was used to keep track of each session with a visualization, a picture summarizing the topics dealt with in the session (created by highly skilled illustrators!!). Moreover, there was a Google doc that collected notes and thoughts on the presentations, referees, and discussions. Given all this available documentation/ information a blog post on the issues treated at the conference seems to be almost obsolete.

That is why I’d like to share some unsystematic thoughts rather than a systematic summary of the conference (also because I missed parts of it). Altogether I think the four directors – Dr. Jeanette Hofmann, Prof. Ingolf Pernice, Prof. Thomas Schildhauer and Dr. Wolfgang Schulz -, together with the organizers, managed to put together a dense program with great speakers (especially on this short notice). I liked the workshop-oriented approach, even if it partly turned out to be more of an academic conference, than an interdisciplinary workshop. The combination of presentations and respondents worked out well and the chairs did a great job in general. My personal highlights were the sessions “Wisdom and Power of the Crowds“, especially Malte Ziewitz’s contribution on crowd wisdom and regulation, and “Dwelling in the Web: Towards a Googlization of Space” with contributions from Florian Fischer, Lonneke van der Velden, Robert Vogler, Tristan Thielmann; commented by Richard Rogers and others.

In the latter session the role of Max Senges, working in Google’s policy team and mediating between the new Institute and Google, as it seemed to me, attracted my attention. Whenever criticism of  Google was raised (e.g. its policy of border drawing in regions such as Tibet) Max Senges started to defend Google, which I found interesting and made me wonder what the overall agenda may be that Google followed with funding the Institute (an aspect that is still not entirely clear to me, but will only get clearer in the upcoming years, I guess). In this context an interesting question was raised by Senges at the very end of the symposium: How could the Institute and its research be evaluated beyond classical academic impact factors? (This question is not easy to answer, of course, but Cornelius Puschmann put up some interesting thoughts for discussion in his recent blog post)

The format of the last day was a little challenging. The idea was to have round table discussions in small groups debating/ reflecting results from the first two days together with stakeholders, who might not have been part of the symposium. Since the schedule was really tight this didn’t turn out so well, I thought. I thus decided to attended a workshop, where Cornelius and David Pachali presented the online platform (to-be) Regulation Watch and discussed it with the workshop participants to figure out what such a platform could/ should provide and who might contribute/ and why – which was fun. Besides the academic insights I got, I appreciated the really good food, drinks and, of course, the boat trip through Berlin by night, one of the highlights I got to experience together with Katrin Weller, René König, and others :)

And, last but not least, I loved to be back in Berlin, which is a truly great and vibrant city. Thanks to Axel Volmar for letting me stay at his place again, in lovely Kreuzberg!

If you got interested in the event more information could be found online: First, all the draft papers created for each of the sessions organized along the four directors and their topical foci. (The Google docs created at the conference and summarizing all workshops are only accessible to participants of the conference unfortunately). Second, blog posts on selected sessions, e.g. by Axel Bruns (SnurBlog), Judith Schossböck (Digital Goverment & Society) or Cornelius Puschmann ( Blog). Third, the visual representations of the sessions provided by Esteban Romero-Frías on his blog. And, finally, a link to the videos of the keynotes of the four directors and Eric Schmidt’s contribution.

Knowledge machines between freedom and control/ Hainburg

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I’ve attended two great events in October. The first one was a symposium organized by the Institute of Media Archeology (IMA) and Theo Röhle, author of the book “Der Google Komplex. Über Macht im Zeitalter des Internets“. The symposium/ workshop took place in the beautiful Kulturfabrik in Hainburg.

© Kulturfabrik Hainburg

The idea of the event “Knowledge machines between freedom and control” was to bring together researchers, artists and programmers dealing with search engines and new media in a more general sense. I really enjoyed working together with artists and net activists, who have both similar and different viewpoints on the matter. Accordingly, on the first day, we tried to identify our positions on the issue, discuss possibilities and challenges in terms of search engine developments, think about utopias, but also concrete policy actions and implementations. In my workshop group the focus was on user profiling, personalization of search results, user data collections, or our “data bodies”, and their implications. While we easily found various issues to criticize (the filter bubble and privacy issues first and formost), we – or at least I – had trouble developing utopias or thinking outside the present socio-political contexts and structures. Hence, we ended up writing a manifesto on our data bodies, which I found liberating and fun! (thanks to Theo for putting this up). Thinking outside of the box and outside of academic requirements leads to pretty interesting results sometimes! Hence, the combination of researchers, artists and programmers really worked out in terms of having triggered creative ideas, writings and drawings, that wouldn’t have popped up in a merely academic arena.

The second day was meant to be a public event, the public, however, was sort of limited unfortunately. We presented and discussed our workshop results along the lines “index”, “algorithm” and “profile”. Finally, we had a round table discussion. Konrad Becker started out with a critical comment, which was followed by a lively debate on Google and Facebook, monopoly formation, alternative indexes and technology, business models, societal implications and potential futures regarding our knowledge machines and their relation to society and business. Moreover, the art piece “Insight Tower – A world machine” enabled us to stick our heads into the net – a piece by Seppo Gründler, Nicole Pruckermayr, and Elisabeth Schimana. In my viewpoint, it was a truly successful event! I especially liked meeting Theo Röhle, Malte Ziewitz, and Katja Mayer again, who all work at the intersection of search engines and science and technology studies. Moreover, I met really cool people like Seda Gürses doing research on social networks and (EU) policy making, and Joris van Hoboken working on search engines and law/ freedom of expression, as well as the media artist Nicole Pruckermayr and the musician/ performer Reni Hofmüller. And, last but not least, the artist/ performer Elisabeth Schimana, who organized the event and does a great job of leading the IMA . Thanks a lot for putting together this amazing crowd of people and ideas!!

goodtosee #9: Scroogle

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I briefly talked about Scroogle in a previous blogpost, but it deserves its own post since it’s such a great tool! Scroogle was developed by Daniel Brandt and basically figures as a proxy for Google search.

That’s how it works according to their website:

Scroogle randomly grabs a Goo IP. Google issues a new cookie with a new ID, and sends the search results. We trash the cookie and save the results in a file that is deleted within the hour. Google records Scroogle’s IP address, the search terms, and the date and time. We parse the file and send the results to the searcher. We don’t use cookies, we don’t save the search terms, and logs are deleted within 48 hours.

Using Google through Scroogle hence protects users’ privacy because it disables the logging and archiving of cookies and IP addresses, which capture users’ search activities. It allows users to enjoy the full search service without feeding user data into the search engine. Contrary to reconfiguring browsers, deleting cookies and other strategies of “digital self-defense”, which often trigger inconveniences, Scroogle maintains the full service (except from Google’s annoying ads). Accordingly, Scroogle may  be seen as exploiting Google. In my perception this is only fair since Google exploits us too by using our web content, linking strategies and, most importantly, our data to create profit. The so-called “user profiling”, the creation of “profiles” out of users’ search terms, search history and locations, is the basis for user-targeted advertising that made Google one of the most profitable companies on earth.*

Scroogle thus enables users to opt out of this economic exploitation scheme, while still providing the benefits of Google search. A clever move! Besides, Scroogle is entertaining too. Its homepage shows a new comic each time you reload the page. Most of the comics make fun of Google, and some of them are truly hilarious:


But check it out yourself, it’s worth risking a look! Another great tool is the Firefox Add-on „TrackMeNot“, which messes up user profiles by sending random search queries to the search engine.

* For an academic discussion on Google’s exploitation scheme within the broader context of capitalist society see, for example:

Fuchs, Christian (forthcoming) A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy of Google, Fast Capitalism, vol. 8, no. 1.

Mager, Astrid (2011) Algorithmic Ideology. How Society Shapes Search Engines, Conference paper for the OII conference “A Decade in Internet Time” (Oxford, 21-24 September).

Pasquinelli, Matteo (2009) Google’s PageRank. Diagram of the Cognitive Capitalism and Rentier of the Common Intellect, in Deep Search: The Politics of Search Engines beyond Google, eds. K. Becker & F. Stalder, Studienverlag, Innsbruck, pp. 152-162.

Amsterdam & Vienna: two cities – two summer schools – some reflections

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I’ve attended two summer schools in the last three weeks and it was fun. Both the digital methods summer school (Amsterdam) and the Marie Jahoda summer school of sociology (Vienna) were highly inspiring events with great participants! The differences were striking though. And reflected the spirit of two different cities and two different academic cultures.













photo credit left: Marieke van Dijk — right: Monica Titton

The purpose of the digital methods event was to learn how to conduct Internet research by following the medium and its natively digital objects. If you want to investigate search engine results, use and learn from Google and its way of functioning, for example. Employ and build on search query data instead of creating artificial user search experiments was one of the messages. How to investigate and theorized “big data” was thus one central issue debated, in Richard Rogers´talk most importantly. What implications the use – and dependency on – algorithms and commercial tools such as Google or Facebook triggers was another interesting aspect raised by Noortje Marres. Besides theoretical discussions – such as the “salon” on Bruno Latour and David Berry moderated by Mark Tuters – we were motivated to work on actual projects. The main part of the summer school was organized around research investigating issues/ controversies in search engine results, on social networking platforms, Wikileaks and other “web spheres”. Here are some maps we developed on the biofuel controversy in Google results in different European countries:

People were thus gathered around computers and tried to make use and sense of the great variety of methods created by the DMI (digital methods initiative) team, but also the network visualization tool Gephi, that Bernhard Rieder presented, and the text coding software DiscoverText developed by Stu Shulman. Thanks to all of you for the great tools and advice!!!

It might be a coincidence that the highly digital summer school took place in Amsterdam – a city concerned with open government data, participatory architecture and urbanity & technology. But it might also reflect the tight entanglement of urban vibes and academic cultures. In Vienna the cultural heritage is central. The first district with its beautiful architecture preserves the empire of the last century. Accordingly, the Viennese summer school took place in a “festive room” mirroring the old charme and elegancy of the University. Paper and pencil instead of hashtag and wiki. The summer school was organized around lectures and presentations instead of laptops and projects. Even though I only participated three days out of six I saw great talks on markets and organizations in the tradition of German intellectual circles. Sophie Mützel talked about the sociology of markets and Frank Hillebrandt elaborated on culture and economy, for example. Further, I learned a lot about economic sociology in a number of great PhD projects from Austrian and German graduate students. That made me realize how interdiscplinary my own work got over the last years, where I was strolling from sociology, science and technology studies, Internet research to digital humanities. I was thus very happy that I got truly great feed-back on my search engine project and reading tipps from the summer school crowd, and especially Sighard Neckel (e.g. “the new spirit of capitalism” by Boltanski and Chiapello, “global complexity” by Urry or “market devices” by Callon, Millo and Muniesa). I do really hope that our paths will cross again in the future!

If you want to learn more about the Viennese summer school I recommend listening to the Ö1 broadcast “Dimensionen” on 26 July 2011, 19h05 (web radio here). Further, I really hope you get to see the “Erschießt Sie – eine Finanzkrisenoper“, which is a theatrical performance of interview material on brokers & the economic crisis based on the book “Strukturierte Verantwortungslosigkeit. Berichte aus der Bankenwelt” (Claudia Honegger, Sighard Neckel und Chantal Magnin). It is a clever and hilarious piece of work!

(photo credit: Summer School)

summer school season 2011

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I’m excited about the summer school season that’s starting soon! My first stop will be Amsterdam, where the Digital Methods Summer School is taking place from the 27 June till the 8 July. It will be fun to meet Richard Rogers, the organizer of the summer school, and his team again and share ideas, empirical insights, and “digital tools”. The program looks amazing and there’s going to be a great number of participants from all over the world (see also this blogpost).

My second stop will be Vienna, where I’ll attend the Marie Jahoda Summer School of Sociology dealing with Economy–Markets–Organizations: The Culture of modern Economy.

That’s an excerpt from the website:

Like all economic processes, markets and organizations are embedded in social structures. Cultural values and political decisions strongly influence economic action, and economic processes follow social norms. The culture of markets transcends the homo oeconomicus. As the new economic sociology has shown, economic action, whether it takes place on markets, in organizations, in networks or as self-management, has to be understood as multi-dimensional and is not bound to an economic rationality existing outside social relations. In this perspective, current processes like the “economization” of social fields become themselves visible as cultural patterns of social organization.

The Marie Jahoda Summer School of Sociology will be set against this thematic background. We will examine competition, firms, management practices and organizations in the economic field, extending it to the arts, religion, sports, fashion, pop culture or the media – social fields, which themselves are examples of today’s “culture of markets”.

It will be really interesting to go back to the Sociology Department, where I studied more than 10 years ago! I’m sure a lot has changed in the last decade and I’m curious about the current state of the field. There will be 19 participants, mostly from the German-speaking context, and I’m happy to be one of them. The summer school will be an excellent opportunity to present my work on search engines in the context of present-day market capitalism and gain feed-back from Austrian/ German researchers. I’m particularly looking forward to  meeting Sighard Neckel, the organizer of the summer school – who kindly invited me to take part in this event – and his collaborators.

goodtosee #6: netpolitics in practice

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I do really like when netpolitics turns into an actual practice, such as the one I’ve just recently learned about in my firefox browser. It’s called Make Your Mark and encourages people to leave a mark to show “support for a people’s web”.

The project is a collaboration between the non-profit organization Mozilla and Evan Roth, an artist and researcher investigating the intersection between free culture and popular culture. Further, the project is supported by the open net advocate Lawrence Lessig. By making your mark you are indicating that you also believe that (according to their website):

The Web is an integral part of modern life.
It is an educator, a communicator, an entertainer, an inspirer, a collaboration of all our creative efforts.
It sparks movements and enables us to share our ideas, our thoughts, our dreams.

The Web is our creation.
We are all contributors, the ones who use the Web every day.
And all the comments and uploads we make add up to something bigger.
This is why we believe that the Web must remain open and accessible to all.

 

 

Mark Up is a celebration of that freedom.
Each person’s mark is an individual expression on a continuous line symbolizing solidarity.
It is a declaration and a chance to show your support for a people’s Web.

So if you identify with that then leave a trace on the web, as I did (maybe an even more creative one 😉 ):

Another really great example of netpolitics in practice is the Firefox add-on: Track me Not. This application was created by Daniel C. Howe, Helen Nissenbaum and Janoss and helps you to protect yourself from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so by irritating search engines such as Google by creating noise and obfuscation.

Practically, this means that the app sends random search queries to search engines such as “Muddy River uses” – the one that’s displayed in my own browser right now. You see, it’s not only useful, it may also be highly entertaining given the stupid queries it sends 😉 More info and download here. Because using the web and getting exploited by big Internet companies must not necessarily be the same, even though it is often case unfortunately..


suma awards 2011

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Check out the SuMa Awards 2011 by the SuMa-eV. The SuMa-eV is a society with the central goal to assure free access to knowledge. In their doing they particularly focus on search engines, that have become central access points to the web and digital knowledge. Their central aim is to work towards a landscape of free, heterogeneous, and non-monopolistic search engines. More concretely, their goal is to raise awareness and information/ digital skills in the public and policy realm, but also to develop alternative technologies.

In addition to these activities they anually award works dealing with search engines or the future of digital knowledge in a more broader sense. That’s how they describe their call:

Our aim is to focus attention on search engines’ role in providing access to online information. The awards address all members of society: artists, scientists, journalists, parents, teachers – everyone who has something to say about the way search engines shape their information environment is welcome to send in contributions.

Our goal is to encourage public debate about the importance of our information environment for the future development of society. We want to spur innovative approaches to all aspects of search engines, not merely to the technical characteristics.

We welcome contributions in any format: text (scientific, journalistic, legal, literary, etc.), audio, video, multimedia, code, or any manner of artistic expression. They may take any style or mood, whether it be analytical, provocative, descriptive, or other. For inspiration, take a look at last year’s winners or at our project gallery. Anyone may take part – simply send your project description to: info@suma-ev.de.

The deadline is 30 June 2011. The prize is worth approx. 3000 EUR & the award ceremony will take place in Berlin, 28 September 2011. More infos on their website or my blogpost “my phd gets a suma award“.

Digital methods summer school, Amsterdam: 27 June – 8 July 2011

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I just arranged my trip to Amsterdam to attend the 5th Digital Methods Summer School organized by Richard Rogers and colleagues. The questions that will be addressed this year are the following (according to the summer school website):

In the 2011 Digital Methods Summer School we will pay homage to cyberspace, in the opening, by presenting thought on a particular strand of media coverage about WikiLeaks, where cybergurus and cyberwar experts reappear on the scene. Just as importantly, we will ask, how to make use of the leaks, and their containers, for research purposes? From data-driven journalism to bespoke cablegate engines, does WikiLeaks spawn an online ecology of tools, visualizations and other substantive practices and outputs? Is such an ecology typical for data platforms? For comparative purposes, we will introduce and study the tool and visualization universes of Twitter as well as Wikipedia, both of which are examples of data-rich media. We would like to learn from platform media analytics and apply it to other data-rich media, so as to further develop tools for cultural diagnostics. One challenge is the question of device effects. For example, when comparing the Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedia entries for the Srebrenica Massacre, does Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view” policies overdetermine the content, perhaps neutralize it, or can one read culturally distinctive views on the events?

Another strand of study is networked content, which is thought of as online content held together, maintained or even co-authored by software and bots. The interplay of search engines and content interests us this year, not just because Wikipedia articles are routinely at the top of Google results. (The relationship between Google and Wikipedia remains understudied.) But there is also content seemingly authored for engines first and readers only second, as in the case of “demand media.” We would like to study efforts that seek to fill in engine results with content, reopening the question of engine epistemology. Presentations will include work on engine log analysis. Apart from (Google) flu trends, are log analyses able to identify and geo-locate cultural and political preference?


More infos on the summer school and some sort of online tutorial on the methods and visualization tools used – such as the Issuecrawler identifying and visualizing link networks – may be found on the Digital Methods Initiative Website or on the Website of the Govcom.org Foundation.

I’m especially interested in the second cluster of questions since I’ll further pursue my research on search engines and their information political implications while being at the summer school. Concretely, I’ll investigate how the controversy around biofuels plays out in search engine results, a project I’m working on together with Jenny Eklöf from the Umeå Studies in Science, Technology and Environment. In this project we basically aim to analyze how search engines structure and stage the controversy, what actors succeed in occupying one of the “top ten seats” and what their positions on the issue are, and what conclusions may be drawn in terms of search engine politics and the commercialization of information. In addition, I’d like to compare search engine results with other web spheres such as Google news, blogs, and social networking sites and their way of ordering, filtering and hierarchizing information on biofuels making use of all the fancy “digital methods” and tools.

I’m already looking forward to the summer school and to work with Richard and his wonderful team again! Not to speak of lovely Amsterdam..

goodtosee #4: “take action” digital grassroots initiatives/ Germany

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I came across a couple of really interesting grassroots initiatives in the context of net politics recently, which I’d like to share today. In the course of the annual re:publica conference (Berlin, 13-15 April) quite some net initiatives have been launched in Germany. First of all, the Blogger Markus Beckedahl from Netzpolitik.org and others have created the non-profit association “Digital Society”. Its main goal is to launch critical campaigns concerning issues such as data privacy or the widely debated law on Vorratsdatenspeicherung (data retention). If you’re interested in this newly constituted association you might want to watch the interview with Markus Beckedahl on the re:publica channel here (in German):


– Amongst other interviews such as the one with Maxwell Salzberg, the founder of the social networking platform Diaspora (see also blogpost goodtosee #1). Concerning Vorratsdatenspeicherung I also recommend to check out Florian Klenk’s blog post “Bringt dieses Gesetz in Brüssel zu Fall” or the Facebook group “Stop Vorratsdatenspeicherung“.

Moreover, Wolfgang Sander-Beuermann from the “SuMa-eV, Verein für freien Wissenszugang” (see also this blog post) has formulated a proposal against the increasing “dominance of the Internet by global online companies”, as may be read on the SuMa-Ev Website (in German again):

Google im Bereich der Suchmaschinen, Facebook bei den sozialen Netzwerken und Apple im Musikgeschäft sind die Symbole einer zunehmenden Monopolisierung des Internets. Die Idee einer offenen Plattform, einer Agora, auf der sich die Bürgerinnen und Bürger des globalen Dorfes treffen und austauschen können, ist durch die zunehmende Monopolisierung und Segmentierung bedroht. Gerade in Bereich der Suchmaschinen droht hier die Balance zwischen Öffentlichkeit und privaten Unternehmensinteressen außer Tritt zu geraten.

He put forward his suggestion to the newly installed Enquete Commission “Internet and Digital Society” of the German Bundestag. If you would like to support this initiative you can vote for it here:

Finally, the book “Datenfresser. Wie Internetfirmen und Staat sich unsere persönlichen Daten einverleiben und wie wir die Kontrolle darüber zurückerlangen” by Constanze Kurz (Chaos Computer Club) and Frank Rieger may be interesting to read. It treats an increasingly important issue, the collection and commodification of our data by Internet companies, but it also seems to go beyond that by showing us ways to protect ourselves. That’s the impression I got from their website at least.. I guess I’ll order it soon. If you come across similar, or also different initiatives, – please do post them in the comments! I’m sure there is more out there, also beyond the German border hopefully! (What about Austria or Sweden?)