Manfred Kreuzwirth seems to be a busy man. Or perhaps just the opposite, a man with time on his hands, since he also seems to be quite the Renaissance Man – extremely multi-lingual and with interests in myriad fields. Or is he a CIA agent poking his nose into Arabic, Polish, Vietnamese, Serbian, Czech, etc. web sites, checking up on people who claim to be discussing home sales, gardening, P2P teaching, computer games, fishing, gig posters, Michael Jackson, football, tourism, Slobodan Milosevic, the comedy of Joe Frank, elves, African-American culture, the music of Chopin …? I’ve never met him, so how do I know this about him? I “googled” him.
Manfred Kreuzwirth showed up in my email inbox requesting membership in our discussion forums (http://www1.svt.ntnu.no/forum/easst/index.php). His name wasn’t on the EASST membership list, but we might have new members who aren’t listed there yet, so I googled him. I found over 60 pages of “hits” for his name – all of them memberships in discussion forums, all of them (that I checked and that showed dates) dated within 24 hours of signing up for EASST Discussion Forums, none of them showing any posts. One site based in Poland reports that “Manfred Kreuzwirth is an unknown quantity at this point.” That’s only because they didn’t google him. Manfred Kreuzwirth, or ManfredKreuzwirth, or Manfred _ Kreuzwirth is, of course, a non-human actor, a “bot.” So are JessiTomei, MashaOlssen, AliseCarter, JeremyMcBacter, CarrieRodriguez, CharlieRoberts, RachelSimpson, and Milena _ Mila. In fact, they may all be the same bot, programmed to generate new names from time to time, or to steal them from human actors. Rachel Simpson, for instance, appears also to be at least one human actor with an on-line presence. But “she”, or rather her “name-twin”, is also clearly a bot, hacking her way into various discussion forums.
Why are they seeking membership in EASST forums? I can’t say for sure; I don’t have the skills to counterhack them and analyze their codes. Some seem to be “selling” (probably just taking money and not delivering) cut-priced and/or limited access products such as drugs, CDs, videos, and porn. Some are probably planting malware, infiltrating computers to plant information-tapping devices or destructive “worms”, “trojans” and other types of “viruses”.
None of these bots have managed to get past our own forums’ last line of defence – me. Yet. They have, however, now found a way past the distorted-random-letters function, once thought to protect effectively against non-human actors. For a while, that function had stemmed the tide. Now I am again receiving 50 or more false sign-ups per day. I feel sure we don’t want these bots running freely on web sites where we might leave any personal information, like our email address, work affiliation, name, gender, age, or information on our academic and other interests. I feel sure that any of us who want to buy Viagra, Cialis, or the latest “cheap drugs” offering, Tamiflu, can find them from more reliable sources. Therefore new member sign-ups are kept on a waiting list as inactive. Several times a week I check the list. Once in a while there is an EASST member amongst them, so I take the time to read each username and check any that seem at all likely. Then I activate those that prove to be EASST members or other STSers and delete the rest. This is why I still request that members sign up using a recognizable version of their real-life name. Once your membership has been activated, you are welcome to change how your name will appear in discussions.
Of course, all this checking and deleting takes time – several hours per week now. The question becomes: Do we keep up the experiment in hopes that it will take off, in hopes that it will prove to be a first step on the road towards turning EASST Review into a fully refereed, perhaps open-refereed, on-line journal? Or … do we give up, leaving the cyberdiscussions field to commercial interests who can afford to pay for editorial and on-line security services? It’s up to you. So far our discussions forum has clearly not reached critical mass: We have twenty forum members and no responses to posts. But I’m willing to keep trying.
After all, it’s not that we have nothing to say to one another. We have lively discussions, academic and otherwise, when we meet at conferences. Perhaps we can also continue on-line between meetings. Perhaps we can even be sociable and analytical at the same time by having an informal discussion on how cybercrime affects cybercommunities and how we might go about researching that theme, or for that matter dealing with it. Must we bombproof our website by welding it shut like a Beirut trashbin, rendering it useless at the same time? Can we find more constructive solutions? Or are we just all too busy, busy, busy?
I wish you all a restful summer, but also a productive one. Here’s hoping that at least those of us researching various aspects of distanced and digital communications (see the workshop report that follows) are productive. Perhaps they can help us to achieve the promise of connectedness digital communications offer, yet avoid being invaded by the very monsters we create in the process.
Amsterdam Workshop Report
In January 2009 the Digital Methods Initiative commenced with its four-year program of seminars (two per year) and international progress conferences (one per year), the latter named after the once annual event in Science & Technology Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam. The Digital Methods Initiative (http://www.digitalmethods.net) is an ongoing collaboration among new media researchers at the University of Amsterdam, seeking to rework method for the Web. Among the key concepts from digital methods that appear in the following are digital groundedness, the technicity of content as well as post-demographics. The workshop report concludes with the research opportunities discussed, including a Google theory of power.
Present at the inaugural Digital Methods research seminar were the Initiative’s director Richard Rogers, coordinator-researchers Sabine Niederer and Esther Weltevrede, researchers Erik Borra, Andrea Fiore, Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff, Michael Stevenson and Laura van der Vlies, and invited participant Lanu Kim, the exchange student who arrived days before from South Korea. Seven papers, distributed to participants beforehand, were introduced and discussed in four sessions.
Google as Inculpable Engine
In the first session, both Rogers and de Vries Hoogerwerff presented work on critical approaches to Google. In “The Googlization Question, and the Inculpable Engine,” Rogers explores what other effects might characterize ‘Googlization,’ generally understood as media concentration, and outlines a research agenda in terms of ‘back-end’ and ‘front-end’ Googlization, drawing from his book, Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004). Where back-end effects may refer to attempts (by Yahoo, Microsoft and others) to emulate Google’s search engine algorithm, front-end effects include the reproduction of the engine’s minimalist aesthetic. Subsequent discussion attempted to further identify a Google-specific form of power, and revolved primarily around the search engine company’s unique status as a “blame-avoidance” machine, first expressed in Google’s own parlance, “Don’t Be Evil.”
If this is to be an accurate description of Google’s strength, one must account for at least one anomaly. Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff’s paper, “Cybercosmopolitanism: The Other Californian Ideology,” deals with the backlash that followed Google’s decision to censor search returns in China. He draws on Google’s decision and publicly declared rationale, as well as reactions from prominent bloggers and Google critics, to reflect on what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron previously termed “the Californian ideology,” and to speculate on its transformation through cultural, commercial and legal concerns. Perhaps most significantly, de Vries Hoogerwerff concludes by recasting the Google China issue as a missed opportunity for proponents and critics of Google to question what he calls a belief in the democracy of the algorithm.
“Wikipedia researchers forgot the bots”
The following session shifted focus to two novel concepts central to Digital Methods research. The first is networked content, which refers broadly to content that is ‘held together’ or otherwise maintained by virtue of its networked form. In “Wikipedia and the Vigilance of the Crowd,” Sabine Niederer details the role of bots and software-assisted users in content creation and upkeep on Wikipedia. Her findings include an inventory of the various kinds of bots and software used, the authority bots hold (having fewer permissions than administrators, but more than registered users) and the relative bot-dependency of different language Wikipedias. Additionally, Niederer’s work sheds new light on previous Wikipedia research. The various analysts and commentators who have entered false information in Wikipedia articles in attempts to confirm or debunk narratives about the site’s reliability, she argues, were perhaps not testing ‘reliability’ in the conventional sense, but rather the technicity of Wikipedia content – the ability of bots, RSS feeds, alerts and the like to point contributors to erroneous edits.
A second concept central to the Digital Methods project is digital groundedness, which inverts epistemological approaches that assess the Web’s knowledge against claims ‘on the ground,’ and asks instead what claims about reality may be made on the basis of digital measures. In her National Webs project, Esther Weltevrede’s has developed a periodization of the Web from the perspective of topology: authored first by notions of cyberspace and virtuality, the Web is increasingly organized regionally and nationally by technological arrangements (e.g. IP-to-Geo location technology), demonstrated by such services as the Google and Yahoo search engines. As the Web is made more local, new avenues for inquiry are opened. Specifically, Weltevrede is developing methods and tools for demarcating and characterizing national Webs, sketching for example the prominence of non-governmental organizations on the Palestinian Web.
Web Machines as Interpolators as opposed to Extrapolators
The two afternoon sessions treated objects of study conventionally grouped under the heading Web 2.0. Erik Borra contributed a review of ‘post-demographics,’ a term used in past Digital Methods research to refer to the preferences, interests and connections entered into databases, distinguishable from variables traditionally accounted for by demographers (e.g. age, race, income, etc.). What story does one’s registered ‘features,’ from friends to favorite books, tell, and how is this information put to use? Crucial to business models that rely on product recommendation (canonically, Amazon’s system based on past purchases), post-demographics also provide sociologists with large data sets for research on social networking. Borra suggests that beyond commercial profiling and the focus on social networking behavior, key research in this area should focus on the derived or ‘hidden’ attribute. In other words, research that does not extrapolate from, but rather interpolates new or previously concealed properties from existing data. An example is the project vriendjespolitiek.net, also by Borra and colleagues, which profiles political parties in the Netherlands based on data from the popular social networking site Hyves.
Theorizing Open Source and Blogging
With “The Bazaar and the Cloud,” Andrea Fiore presented research into the relationship between free and open source software (FLOSS) and the ‘software as service’ paradigm that relies on cloud computing. Following Tiziana Terranova, Fiore argues against a dichotomous view of open source struggling against the proprietary forces of such software providers as Google, and instead seeks to highlight their interdependence. After reviewing back-end symbiosis – the FLOSS-enabled infrastructure of cloud computing – Fiore turns to what he calls a front-end strategy of “controlled openness.” The strategy is epitomized by the application programming interface (API): “By releasing open source libraries that wrap its own APIs into the control language of specific programming languages or operating systems, a service like Google mobilizes crowds of programmers in the work of building new front-ends” for its services. Reflecting back on the question of Googlization, discussion turned to both the possibility (and desirability) for open source developers to maintain a position outside the mix of proprietary software and open source that ‘software as service’ appears to require.
In the day’s final presentation, Michael Stevenson discussed recent work on the rise of blogging in the 1990s. Stevenson sees common ground in theories of blogging from Geert Lovink and Henry Jenkins, and builds on these to theorize the medium’s early development as the fabrication of an alternative media practice, one that deliberately sought to move beyond the subculture-mainstream divide. Drawing on initial attempts by users and commentators to characterize the medium, he argues that blogging signaled a turn away from the subcultural roots of the Web (including the virtual communities that blogging succeeded) and was simultaneously conflated with shifting definitions of the Web’s purpose.
Google’s Power Theory and Other Research Thoughts
The concluding plenary session discussed new research opportunities in a kind of top ten list provided by Rogers, together with the participants. (Only seven are covered here.) First, Google was described as an inculpable engine because of the increasing personalization of its results. One has oneself to blame, in part, for the results. Though not necessarily Google-specific, the ability to cast aside blame for its output is suggestive of a form of power Google has assumed. Relatedly, the idea of its democratic algorithm, with sites voting for other sites by linking, and the machine ultimately outputting what the search engine industry calls ‘organic results,’ also fits into thoughts of a blame-avoidance machine. (There was an invitation to think through how Lewis Mumford’s model of democratic versus authoritarian technics would be affected, as well as those built upon it.) Second, again with respect to Google, is another larger issue of how to do user studies. Normally, users are observed, interviewed, or surveyed. In standard registrational approaches their eyes may be tracked with an apparatus. However, Google is performing its very own form of user studies by treating the user as a data set, with preferences, a history and a location. It is also providing ‘user feedback,’ that is, results tailored in a variety of ways. Should method follow object, how might Google’s example be followed to innovate in approaches to the user?
Third, the Web, especially the projects that order it, has seen a gradual decline in editors, with the algorithmic engine (in Yahoo and Google) winning out over the special directory projects (Yahoo’s own and Google’s engine on top of Dmoz.org, the Open Directory Project). Something similar holds for Wikipedia’s collective authorship, over the editorial authorship of old, however much Wikipedia struggles with and sometimes seeks to straddle the two models. It was pointed out, fourthly, that there is an urgency to study the relationship between Google and Wikipedia, as their relationships are manifold. One of the more interesting ones is the collective editorship process of putting an article up for deletion, because the subject matter returns little or no results in Google. Thus Google becomes the authorizing entity for Wikipedia. In the study of Wikipedia to date, much attention has been placed on the vigilance of the Wikipedian community, and especially the community’s capacity to spot errors and vandals. What is missing from Wikipedia studies – the fifth point – is a symmetrical attention to the software bots (as opposed to the heroic humans). The question arose as to the status of previous Wikipedia studies that have left out the bots.
In the discussion of Internet censorship and Google in China, researchers worldwide are generally aware of how and when China censors, thanks to the work of the University of Toronto and Harvard University. However, what is remarkable (sixth point) is it appears that Google, in complying with Chinese censorship practice, makes its own blacklists! Google fetches pages through machines in China to check whether they are blocked, and subsequently updates its own search engine outputs, removing those pages blocked in China. In a perverse sense such a practice would make Google into one of the more thorough Internet censorship research organizations.
The remaining points concern the politics of code, and how they affect research. One discussion (seventh and last point) revolved around the APIs, the data feeds provided by engines for the purposes of research and mash-ups. Owing to the small data sets they furnish (limited number of queries per day), it is difficult to gather a sufficient data population. Rather than rely on APIs fully – Google pulled one of theirs, leaving researchers and others without data – there is the other data-collection practice called ‘scraping,’ or sometimes ‘screen-scraping.’ But too much scraping prompts the engines and other services to block the data collection. The larger issue concerns researchers’ abilities to analyze engines, if the APIs provide too little, and scraping is punished.
Michael Stevenson is pursuing a PhD in Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. Richard Rogers holds the chair in New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam.
I am delighted to be taking on the role of President of EASST for the next 4 years. First of all, many thanks from me and the Council for the leadership and energies of Christine Hine, who has led the organization so ably and left it in such good shape.
As I stated in my election address I am committed to ensure that EASST strengthens its role as the broad and inclusive voice of the international science, technology & innovation studies community. During the next 12 months we will be reviewing the position of the organization in order to achieve this and initiating a discussion among the membership.
The next EASST conference, provisionally titled, ‘Practising science and technology - interfaces of organizing and communicating’ will be in Trento, Italy on 2-4 September 2010. We held a meeting of the new EASST council in Trento in May 2009 in order to prepare for this event. This is going to be an excellent conference in a great place. The Faculty of Sociology has first class facilities and is in a wonderful location in the Dolomites. Staff at the University and their colleagues in STS Italia will be our knowledgeable hosts. It is a small and delightful town and there will be a ceiling of 600 participants – my advice is to make sure that you book early to avoid disappointment.
The conference will be designed to involve a range of specialist networks in its organisation. The initial call which will be published in September will ask for proposals for streams to run through the whole conference as well as nominating the people who will take responsibility for them. The organisation of these streams will then be assigned to those selected so it will be a more decentralised model. This is an interesting experiment which should deliver good results.
The Council meeting in Trento was a rewarding experience and members should be assured that they have elected an energetic and enthusiastic team. We have also instituted a new administrative support structure managed by Dr Sonia Liff. A priority is to get the membership subscriptions up to date and you will have heard from us with regard to this. Please respond soon or, if your contact details have changed, please email admin at easst.net