What would John Dewey think of hacker and maker spaces?

While reading Experience and Education I was drawn to thinking through the culture of hacker and maker spaces (HMSs) through the eyes of John Dewey. As a pragmatic philosopher on education and democracy, he turns out to be the perfect lens for considering the culture of these spaces. Dewey would first read in HMSs a kind of continuation of the tug-of-war between “traditional” and “progressive” education. Their members enact a kind of anti-organization that is built around social learning, maximizing individualism while encouraging collaboration. Dewey saw sociality as essential to education, but noted that “community life does not organize itself in an enduring way purely spontaneously” (Dewey, 1997, p. 56). As much as Dewey questioned the institutionalized order of his day, he also had qualms with the progressives. Complete freedom “tends to be destructive of the shared cooperative activities which are the normal source of order” (Dewey, 1997, p. 63). That is, some amount of confinement is necessary.  Hackerspace members – geeks, artists, and hackers – tend to be highly individualistic, even introverted and anti-social. A shared workspace provides a way to bring together a heterogeneous community and structure interactions that lead to learning through participation.

Hackerspaces are a place to socialize, linger, and play with technology. HMSs serve as a counterpoint to literature that conceives of hackers as atomized groups that communicate exclusively through online technologies such as IRC and Github. Gabriella Coleman (2010) noted a dearth of research that considered “the existence and growing importance of face-to-face interactions among these geeks, hackers and developers” (p. 48). HMSs thus accomplish a delicate balancing act similar to other democratically-aligned collectives, particularly coming out of 1960s counterculture. They embrace notions of equal access and democratic conventions. However, we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the importance of leaders in HMSs. Members reject external (Weberian) authority but embrace what Dewey might call “factors of control that are inherent within experience” (Dewey, 1997, p. 21). It might be more productive to consider how members embrace what James Gee calls “porous leadership” where individuals take the helm at various times but don’t assume a formal leadership role. In other words, individual skill sets are invaluable for HMSs’ success, even if strong personalities can be a detriment. One of my HMS interviewees put it this way:

Right, we’re full of tools! our members are all tools. it’s funny because it does really have a dual meaning. People who are authoritative on subjects tend to be extremely opinionated. Which can make them come across as the colloquial tool… [like] the guy from scrubs. “I’m a tool, I’m a tool tool tool?” Yeah, people are annoying, and people are extremely hard to deal with, but you know what? They’re also assets.

Talk about socio-materiality. Speaking of which, hackers are the ultimate pragmatists. In the context of learning, Dewey defines pragmatism’s “essential feature is to maintain the continuity of knowing with an activity which purposely modifies the environment” (Dewey, 1915, p. 369). Hackerspace members’ crafting of physical space for learning follows on their creative use of technologies to accomplish their goals. Tim Jordan described how hackers “enact the sociality of technology” (Jordan, 2008, p. 15) in that they both believe in technological determinism and simultaneously refute it by closely linking is to individual agency. Consider the “design patterns” that were first presented at the Chaos Computer Club in 2007. These suggestions are designed to craft experiences and interactions that occur in hackerspace. They range from altering group processes, events, tools in the space. If something isn’t working, shuck it and try something else. Hackerspace members are constantly testing ideas and encouraging others to do the same. This is the meaning of do-ocracy: a radical pragmatism designed to unite the group through shared actions. It should be noted that do-ocracy is not normless, but it requires participants to sense and act on norms of the space. There is a certain reflexivity in hackerspaces. Moving down this road we might draw on Paul Leonardi’s concept of “imbrication” (Leonardi, 2011), where he uses ethnographic inquiry to examine how routines with technology in organizations change. But this is a different question. What I’m more interested in is the culture of hackerspaces and how they serve as an example of “hacker culture” moving towards being increasingly democratized. Which is a topic bigger than the curent blog post.

—

Coleman, E. G. (2012). Coding freedom : the ethics and aesthetics of hacking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Coleman, G. (2010). The Hacker Conference: A Ritual Condensation and Celebration of a Lifeworld. Anthropological Quarterly, 83(1), 47–72. doi:10.1353/anq.0.0112

Dewey, J. (1915). Democracy and education: an introduction to the philosophy of education,. Dehli: Aakar Books.

Dewey, J. (1997). Experience and education. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Jordan, T. (2008). Hacking : digital media and technological determinism. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Leonardi, P. (2011). When Flexible Routines meet Flexible Technologies: Affordance, Constraint, and the Imbrication of Human and Material Agencies. MIS Quarterly, 35(1), 147–167.

new website: mobile collectives

I’ve spun out a website devoted to mobile collectives, or social aggregations that emerge from social media platforms used on mobile devices, particularly “smart phones” and tablets. For the next year there will likely be far more activity there as I drill down on this one exciting topic. 

Google Glass, Vision and Ubiquitous Computing

Google glass is the most provocative recent development in the mobile space. It echoes previous symbols of subcultural affiliation - cyberpunk’s “Mirror Shades” and steampunk’s goggles. But glass is presented to us as an entirely new paradigm and a mainstream accessory.  

There are a number of reasons why glass is an interesting touchstone for scholars from a variety of disciplines. It’s foremost an extension of ubiquitous computing’s (ubicomp) utopian desire to have the technology “disappear.” In Mobile Interface Theory Jason Farman elaborates further: ”the ‘interfaceless interface’ of pervasive computing carries with it the threat of exercising hegemony by receding to the background and avoiding critique” (p. 29). The video lampooning Google Glass as a new advertising space - literally, capturing eyeballs – is likely not realistic. Advertisers still haven’t figured out how to monetize mobile phones, never mind something far more exotic. However, it is certainly a move by Google to get people to create and engage with more content for various types of monetization. Data are valuable, and this is part of the gold rush. 

More pragmatically, glass evokes privacy concerns. On one hand, video and audio recording has long been available in cell phones and “keychain cameras.” On the other, the wearing of google glasses is a clear signal that you may be recording those around you. This question of regulating one’s body in response to possible (perhaps not actual) observation is a classic Foucauldian notion. The argument among some surveillance scholars is that the state has essentially outsourced its surveilling to individuals vis-a-vis social media platforms. I’m sympathetic to these concerns, but overall more interested in the question of social cohesion: will glass bring distanced people together at the expense of local synchronous interaction? Sergey Brin has described smartphones as “emasculating” and “isolating” in comparison to glass. Beyond the strange claim that a pair of rimless glasses is somehow manly, Brin encourages us to think of google glass as hip and unifying. In an advertisement for glass, Google pluck our heartstrings as they present the always-on information retrieval and storage features of glass as an inroad to our own humanity. <snark>I’m tempted to wonder if at the end of my life Google will have a “flashback” option that compiles my greatest video hits for easy perusal before I snuff it. Otherwise, what meaning would life have?</snark> 

Going back to technological histories, it’s clear that glass encourages the types of utopian and dystopian discourses that always accompanies new technologies. Scholars are going to have a field day with this one. What will Donna Haraway say? What would McLuhan? 

Ringing the Dead

A CNN report on the Aurora, Colorado shooting on July 20, 2012 where twelve died in a movie theater noted the “eerie sound of cell phones ringing, over and over again.” Another story on a night club fire in Santa Maria, Brazil where over two hundred perished focused on how the ringing were particularly unnerving for first responders. Confronted with a scene of unimaginable tragedy, the media are repeatedly compelled to note what is a comparatively trivial point: the presence of ringing cell phones. Here I am interested not in confronting the cause or scope of these tragic events, which vary in their international context and cause. This would be a disservice to the victims. Rather, I am just hoping to unpack: why is this detail particularly disturbing? Why is it even noteworthy for the media to report this minor fact in a culture suffused with cell phones? Isn’t the scope of these tragedies horrifying enough?

Cell phones are attached to individuals as personal technologies. As has been frequently noted, you no longer call someone’s phone, rather you call them. A mobile phone does not exist on its own in space. This is a difference from previous generations. A ringing land-line phone would simply indicate that nobody was home. The place, a house, would be empty – not a particularly disturbing thought. Furthermore, use of mobile devices as phones is something of a rarity. Young people in particular use their multifunctional devices for coordination and communication through anything but voice: SMS text messaging, email, web surfing, geolocative services, micro-blogging and so on. The sudden ringing of cell phones in tandem is a rare event that throws us off-guard. I’m reminded of the end sequence in the (admittedly, schlocky) “cyberspace” thriller Lawnmower Man; it isn’t clear if the antagonist survived, until he fulfills his promise of making every phone on earth ring simultaneously, an action so rare that it couldn’t happen naturally.

Fears about the simultaneously enabling and constricting nature of cell phones reflect the integration of mobile devices into society as an extension of paranoias about technologies as a whole. Allison Whitney noted that in films using landline phones, “while people grew to appreciate the telephone’s efficacy in supporting personal and public safety, modern societies’ growing dependence on this technology also aroused larger anxieties about the system’s potential contingencies and failures.” Films routinely use mobile phones as plot devices, showing characters talking on cell phones only to keep movie-goers on edge when they break or go out of range. A ringing cell phone after a tragedy reminds us how technology is often useless to prevent these kinds of tragic events.

Mobile devices are seen as both enabling and constraining. Although we are tightly-integrated into networks of friends and families on mobile devices, technology is seen as paradoxically isolating. Nowhere is this more visible in the current obsession of psychologists creating diagnoses around technology usage. Young people are described in the media as simultaneously technology-savvy (“digital natives”) and at increased risk for a host of unhealthy habits.“Facebook addiction” describes how users are helpless to resist their desires to check in on their social media networks, which can even cause depression. The theory here is that social networks are a constant reminder of how much better off others are doing, and we feel worse about ourselves.

 A ringing cell phone next to a body is also “an instant reminder that this person is human.” Humanity here is oddly associated more with the technology than with the person. The uncanny valley effect describes our revulsion to a person that appears alive, but are also noticeably not alive. Zombies, for example, let us flirt with this sense of horror. On one hand they are literally the living dead, but on the other, would never be mistaken for being literally alive. Ringing cell phones next in the site of a tragedy force us to consider the connectedness and humanity of victims.

This is also an example of how we are forced to blend previously disparate steps of notification and mourning that used to be clearly-defined. Decades ago, a tolling bell was a signal to a community to come together to mourn, rather than reminding us of friends and family who haven’t yet been notified. 

Leave the Door Ajar

This morning my friend Alex Leavitt took a bold stance in his blog, announcing that he would only participate in open-access journals and conferences. He started off by noting the sad passing of Aaron Swartz, who made his beliefs felt in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto and for which he was vilified. His story is not the one I am commenting on (many far closer to him have penned far more detailed articles), although I would think he would approve of Alex’s stance, which prompted me to re-think my own assumptions about how young scholars should operate. I’m posting some of these thoughts here.

I admire the strong message he sends. His take is bold because it directly confronts the stakes young scholars face in deciding where and how to disclose academic work. The system of academia rewards those who can produce written work that is published in peer-reviewed journals. These publications tend to be behind a “paywall” that restricts access to subscribers, which generally are members of institutions that can afford a license. This places academics in a strange situation where they are not paid for writing that they often produce with money from public sources, only to have it judged worthy and sold back to institutions. It’s deliriously out-dated. However, it’s the game recognized by professors, who tend to want to see their students publish in a fairly restricted set of journals. Our careers are valued on weirdly computed, often skewed numbers that have names like “impact factors.” Attaining tenure is more strongly based on publishing than teaching or service.

An open-access only stance would be far more difficult to follow through on just a few years ago. He quotes danah boyd’s similar statement from 2008, who eventually did publish again in paywalled journals, which isn’t that surprising given the numerous scholars she’s worked with and the state of OA in 2008. The only open-access journals that I remember existing when I started my Ph.D program were Surveillance and Society, and First Monday. Now there are promising OA communication journals with solid editorial and review processes popping up: the International Journal of Communication (IJOC), review of communication research,  communication + 1, triple C, and the journal of peer production. These excite me greatly as options for budding scholars and I hope to work with them soon. It seems that going 100% OA is at least an option.

I’d like to bring up a major issue that gets overlooked in many discussions in the open culture movement about how predatory journals are voraciously appropriating the term “open access.” By predatory, I mean publications (term used charitably) that charge a fee to authors for the privilege of publishing in their journal, have flimsy (if any) peer review/editing, and dump articles to a website. They often spam conference email lists with offers to publish articles with letters that often have tells, such as grammar errors and mistakes in understanding a given field of research. They essentially masquerade as open-access to charge publishing fees to authors, trapping scholars in bogus deals that are useless, if not downright embarrassing, on a C/V. This is a serious liability for young scholars who are often frazzled, overworked and stressing about passing muster at their University of College.

Access in academia has never simply been “open” or “closed.” A simple example of making paywalls more permeable is the placing of a PDF on a personal website, or if under copyright, a simple line that says “email for PDF.” I have had an academic flat out refuse to email me a PDF (rather than simply forget, which is more common) all of exactly once. Alex finds this workaround angering. Maybe I am simply content to live with sharing as necessary for recognition in my discipline, at least until open-access journals mature.

Beyond social media, information in academia moves across permeable boundaries such as classes, conferences, and social networks. Diane Crane elaborated on the concept of “invisible colleges,” referring to informal academic networks. In her 1972 book of the same name she analyzed networks built from academic citations. As it turns out, disciplines have quite different patterns of sharing, and some academics are particularly prolific “hubs.” This was, of course, more newsworthy when the networked paradigm of communication didn’t yet dominate. I see shades of this idea in Henry Jenkins’ early work on groups of television fans assembling to collaborate on stories using characters and plotlines from mainstream entertainment.

In the current day, I see strong and vibrant social networks developing among academics that cut across disciplines. We are studying broad themes that by definition have to move across these boundaries, and are not fully defined by journals or conferences. We aren’t waiting for publications or disciplines to catch up. This gives me tremendous hope for the future of my discipline. I don’t think we, at least in communication, are as hung-up on reinforcing disciplinary boundaries or shutting down discussion. We would be pretty terrible communication scholars if that were true.

I think the open-closed discussion also draws our attention to differential access. We are seen and heard in, let’s face it, pretty privileged media and spaces that are not open to everyone. This is why I admire scholars that make efforts to make their work not just physically accessible but comprehendible in public venues (although I am also sensitive to Judith Butler’s stance that, drawing from Adorno, that “one of the most important ways to call into question the status quo is by engaging language in nonconventional ways”). Crane’s point was that networks of collaboration are not simply built from reading publications, but by being tied to social networks. Making publications available is a good starting point, but neglects thinking about economic and cultural barriers to connecting. We should also continue to think deeply about the stakes involved with inclusion, rather than just presentation of one’s own work. IAMCR, for example, has a sliding scale for admission that takes into account the differential access from less affluent countries. We need to get people literally in the room and serve as emissaries for our disciplines.

At the end of the day, I can’t take the strong stance Alex did. Getting accepted at conferences such as the International Communication Association (ICA) is part of connecting with fellow academics, even if it does involve participating in posting papers to a website that is accessible only to paying conference-goers. If I am able to get a paper in a leading journal, I need to exercise that option. If nothing else, I worry about my wife and daughter having to deal with me moping around the house if I don’t find some way to make myself useful after graduation.

What I can get behind is Alex’s pushing for us to act, stating that “there’s no image to share, no petition to sign, no badge to display: at this critical and crucial point, there is only action.” Maybe I can’t go 100% open-access, but I will promote ample work-arounds and publish in OA journals where possible. Ph.D students are, well, everywhere. We can speak for open-access in meetings and to those who make sure the trains run on time. Specifically, the strong connection between peer review and paywalled journals is an artifact of history. It seems important to convince our professors to review for OA journals and break the hold paywalled journals have on peer review, which is, ultimately, the measure of scholarship valued by institutions, not the name of the journal. Finally, academic publishers are in very much the same bind as the publishing industry at large. It also seems necessary to propose new publishing models that are not built on exorbitant fees charged by journals to institutions for access to research.

Platforms three ways

“Platform” as a term has emerged into prominence over the last few years. Scholars have been carefully unearthing the term, examining its rhetorical use, computational impact, and implications for marketing and distribution of media. I touch on three scholars here to briefly outline their usage of the term, and the fruitful discussions that have been taking place around it.

Tarleton Gillespie (2010) noted how the word has been employed rhetorically by firms as careful negotiation of obligations to various stakeholders. Twitter, for example, wishes to appeal to marketers (advertising platform), investors and individuals self-organzing for civic unrest against dictatorial regimes (in the “Arab Spring”). I’ve described previously how Twitter goes through great lengths to present itself as aligned with more populist goals, both complying with censorship requests and making these requests public. Twitter is able to promote a more egalitarian agenda while simultaneously adhering to legalistic and economic frameworks in which it is embedded. The term itself is not that important, because companies capitalize on its vagueness. Gillespie’s contribution is secondarily to map the wide-ranging ways that the term is employed, but most importantly, elaborating on the linguistic flexibility of platforms as entities with various conflicting goals.

Bogost (2009) comes closest to what Gillespie describes as a computational definition of platform, specifically investigating software and hardware platforms for development. However, he is also interested more broadly in cultural formations around platforms, particularly of professional and amateur software developers. He pushes back on Gillespie and advocates for a narrower conception based on the perspective from engineers and developers, writing that “something is a platform when a [sic] developers consider it as such and use it” (p. 4). This waffling around the term is clearly not as interesting to Bogost as the features, development environment, and perspective of the engineers. He describes platforms as “‘deep’ or ‘far away’ from the user experience” (p. 5), but also influential of everything that is built on it. We can extract from Bogost’s narrower definition that considering a more materialist perspective on platform can be illuminating of what kinds of development and execution environments lead to better or worse software, creative hacks, and user experiences.

A similar but more expansive route is taken by Bogost’s fellow Georgia Tech professor Janet Murray (2011), who describes platforms as combinations of hardware, software, accessories and other formats (p. 34). Stability in platforms comes from close or loose coupling of these infrastructural components. Apple, with its iPhone, iTunes software, and online storefront, comprise a stable platform. From her designer’s perspective this is interesting because it creates a set of emerging standards that are tightly-coupled and lead to possibilities for “the sustained development of expressive genres” (p. 35). Murray only touches on the notion of platforms, as it is not central to her discussion, which is more focused on the collective process of design and how designers can take advantage of it. Murray’s notion can be considered to be more of an infrastructural perspective of platforms from a marketing and sales standpoint. This definition should appeal to mass communication scholars interested in dynamics of distribution and also has more interplay with the policy arena.

Bogost, I., & Montfort, N. (2009). Platform Studies: Frequently Asked Questions. Presented at the Digital Arts and Culture, Irvine, CA.

Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of “platforms.” New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364. doi:10.1177/1461444809342738

Murray, J. H. (2011). Inventing the medium : principles of interaction design as a cultural practice. Cambridge  Mass.: MIT Press.

Cool sexism, bro(grammer): geek subculture and masculinities

I feel obligated to write a quick few paragraphs on brogrammers because they combine together two topics of interest: geek subculture and masculinities. (If you aren’t familiar with the recent press on so-called “brogrammers,” check the gee-whiz-y Business Week article here, and the more comprehensive Mother Jones piece here)

Looking beyond the narrow confines of geek subculture, I see shades of the 1980′s “crisis of masculinity” where enthusiasm for the “new man” of the 1970s turned intro criticism of their wimpiness. Think of how the reaction to the “sensitive new age guy” was to forge the image of the manly-man that didn’t eat quiche. Danilo Stern-Sapad’s claim that ”we’re the cool programmers” reveals that brogrammer is a consciously reactionary identity that is positioned against previous software developers of the 1990s & 2000s, which were stereotyped as introverted and anti-social. Enter the ridiculously hypermasculine dude-y brogrammer, who drinks on the job, works out obsessively and wears mirrored aviator shades in their best Top Gun imitation.

It’s also important to keep in mind that the brogrammer reveals the internal language of male geeks to the public eye…. This is hardly a defense of geek chatter just because it’s private, but neither should geeks being misogynistic be particularly surprising. Lori Kendall, in Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online, observed that males in an online community called BlueSky use terms that denigrate women even as they fall short of societal norms of masculine ideals. This occurs not in conversations with women, but in an attempt to connect with other men: ”men in groups create sexual and gender narratives that may not resemble their lived experience but nevertheless form important elements of their masculine identities and their connections with other men” (p. 87). In other words, even though the sexist banter in their online roles don’t match with their offline lives, it’s still a way for them to connect with other men.

When Van Horn stammered ”I’m sorry for being sexist, I apologize in advance” before starting a presentation on “bikini babes” he was acknowledging an awareness of the offensiveness of the material before proceeding to violate norms of public and professional conduct. The presentation fell flat because the blatently sexist (antiquated, really) imagery was evaluated in public rather than a small group that would be either receptive to the ironic stance, or at least wouldn’t spread it around social media with quite the same enthusiasm. In part, it’s another story of violation of public & private norms through social media.

I was reminded of Ariel Levy’s Female Sexist Pigs when an anonymous commentator commented that “‘Brogrammer’ isn’t an exclusionary term… the female equivalent is called a ‘hogrammer’.” The rise of raunch culture lowers all expectations. The female version of the term is a pejorative for sexual promiscuity, not fraternal inclusion. Yet what is especially worrisome is that some smaller companies seem to have few qualms about incorporating the brogrammer image into recruitment campaigns. Masculine representations are expressions of power, and it’s dangerous when companies signal that the “talent” they seek equates to a particular gender. While we’re at it, what hasn’t gotten enough attention is the completely heteronormative nature of brogramming in an industry that, frankly, I’ve found to be pretty damn queer-friendly. Luckily it doesn’t seem like brogramming has much traction among larger companies.

Tinker & Talk Thursdays (3T) 3/22 7 – 10 PM

Tinker & Talk Thursdays (3T)
March 22, 7 – 10 PM
Brought to you by @DIYGirls, @PyLadies, @ONA & @Annenberglab 

Tinker & Talk Thursdays (3T) is a free monthly event that brings together geeks and students to share projects, solve technical problems and brainstorm creative uses for technology. 3T was created to foster a more inclusive environment for collaboration, and is hosted by the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC through partnerships with DIYGirls, PyLadies, and ONA. Everyone is welcome.

This week’s show & tells include Twitter sentiment analysis and the debut of the LOONG table, a 12′ long, multi-touch interactive video environment. Then the floor will also be open to anyone else who wants to present (bring stuff!), or we’ll just socialize and tinker.

This is the place to meet cool, like-minded people. If you’re having problems with a project, this is the place to solve them. If you have skills, maybe you can help that person from the last sentence. Or perhaps you just have an idea for a cool project that you’re interested in developing and don’t want to be hassled about your “business model.”

Coffee and light refreshments will be available. No recruiters please.

Directions
Street parking around USC is available in the evenings. The fastest route is to park on Jefferson and walk south on Watt Way to the Annenberg building. The Innovation Lab is located off the west lobby of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at Watt Ave. and Hellman Way. Signs will be posted around the Annenberg building directing you to the Innovation lab. Please see the attached map, or go to 
http://web-app.usc.edu/maps/
 and search for “ASC”.

Contact
For questions or more information, please contact Andrew Schrock at @aschrock.

Why Twitter’s hiding tweets by location accomplishes the opposite of censorship: It extends the reach of Twitter and censored tweets

There has been a huge amount of international discussion about Twitter blocking tweets based on the country in which you reside. If you’ve missed it, Twitter has publicly stated that if you make a tweet that your government claims breaks the law in your local country, they can request that Twitter block it. Twitter would then decide if they will fulfil the request. If they do, the tweet would not be visible in your country. The rest of the world would still be able to see the tweet.

Twitter is trying to thread a needle of being gaining entry to non-US countries while continuing to grow. They need to remain profitable through paid access to its firehose, promoted trends, and promoted accounts, all of which are research or marketing features. Alongside these very economic goals they also want to be a many-to-many communication medium for the entire world. It’s a pretty difficult thing to do — meet the requests of western marketers to sell products while providing a way for people to collude in the downfall of dictatorships.

You have to read between the lines a bit in their blog post: “we try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t. The Tweets must continue to flow.” So let’s start a bit of deciphering to detail why I am not calling for a boycott of Twitter…

1. It is better that Twitter is mostly permitted in other countries than blocked entirely. Twitter cannot simply demand that countries let them into their corner of the Internet. Twitter functions because, like all Internet services, it relies on the layers of networking that make up the Internet. China has opted to try to block it, while during the “Arab Spring” it was heavily throttled in Syria. So there are examples of how a government can deem Twitter too much a risk and block it or make it unusable by fiddling with the inner workings of the Internet. As Nancy Messieh put it, “Twitter isn’t censoring you. Your Government is.” Asking Twitter to not delete tweets where they are breaking local law is a little unrealistic. Twitter will just cease to work in these countries if government or other entities muck with the underlying technology. Furthermore, it is better to have a technology with easy workarounds than an entirely unusable one.

2. Twitter has tacitly endorsed workarounds. Individuals have a long history of finding loopholes in online technologies. There’s currently an easy workaround to blocking by location that could easily be removed, but so far has not been. Other workarounds include proxy servers, which is one more complex way of getting around China’s blocking. Right now the workaround is exceedingly simple and known to anybody who cares to search.

Hey, I was just thinking, how easy would it be to make a Twitter bot use the takedown list to find and retweet from one country tweets that were banned in another, thus making the banned posts visible again? The answer is: really freaking easy. 

3. Twitter will make all requests (complied and otherwise) public through ChillingEffects, which will amplify the “censored” topic. This point has been apparently lost in the vociferous objections to Twitter’s public policy of removing tweets. Google and others already have the same policy. This effectively turns the spotlight toward the governments or entities that made the request. In fact, it will probably amplify the message behind whatever the tweet was about, because the takedown requests appear to have enough information in them to figure out approximately what the objection was to the content. Remember also that people can view tweets in other countries.

Twitter is also not the only way word gets around online. It is one but not the only technology that can flow across borders, and works well in combination with blogs, news websites, and social network sites. Talk about an easy way for journalists to find their next story – what was the repressive government so concerned about that they tried to block it? Check the takedown request, find the offending tweet, then go interview the sender.

4. Takedown requests are woefully inadequate to keep up with Twitter traffic. Twitter is about what is happening right now. Fifteen minutes ago is old news. Hundreds of millions of tweets are broadcast every day. Twitter knows this when they state that “we are going to be reactive only.” A delay of even an hour basically ensures that someone else will pick up an important tweet and relay it. While this is not a guarantee that a voice will not be silenced, Twitter thrives on echos of its own users tweets, so it seems likely the important messages will get out.

In my last post I detailed how takedown requests (all 4411 of them) have been limited in scope (DMCA only), mainly UK/US, and clustered. In other words they have been made by western interests and involve US law (the digital millennium copyright act). China and Saudi Arabia racked up one request each. So far it has been a western conversation fueled by the same piracy concerns that have been around for years. It’s really nothing new. It remains to be seen when and how Twitter complies with other types of requests.

5. What are the politics of platforms? Do companies have different sets of obligations than other entities towards local space? This is the most important open question, and goes back again to the challenges of making money on marketing features while also providing a way for people to politically mobilize. Twitter was built as a platform rather than a program, meaning it has all the back-end functionality for programmers to easily build apps around the service. Tarlton Gillespie describes platforms as boundary objects, where companies and individuals can have competing visions of what a platform should do. For participants in the Arab Spring, Twitter is a symbol of freedom. For Twitter executives, it’s a difficult to monetize technology that has slowed in growth, and dammit, we need to keep expanding! (always and forever… sigh)

Right now users and Twitter are tenuously aligned. Executives want more people to use the service, while individuals want to be able to use the service in an unrestricted way. Yet, local governments have entirely different demands, as do protesters. So you see this delicate dance of wording and features play out over the last few days between Twitter and the rest of the world.

Platforms have also become part of physical space, which complicates frictions between the global and the local. As Eric Gordon and Adriana De Souza e Sila state in Net Locality, “The concept of the web as a metaphorical city has given way to the reality of the web as part of the city” (p. 9). We participate online in an endless series of short encounters that reference physical space as a kind of contextual linkage that may fade into the background, or revealed. A previous post of mine on the PIRT blog about Google Streetview is one example of problematic revealing. People are mostly objecting to Twitter’s decision because this could block online conversation from those who most need to participate in it. This is a very real and valid concern. But in the blocking, the conversation will be amplified through public takedown notices, and the tweets still visible from other countries.

So in summary… this is not SOPA. SOPA would make entire domains invisible at the packet layer. Twitter has offered governments an olive branch in the form of blocking functionality that works merely at the data layer, leaving open a variety of easy workarounds. Takedown requests are also insufficient to keep up with the speed of tweets. If we could take a few collective deep breaths and see if and when Twitter opts to use this functionality we will have a much better idea of the long-term effects. Making the statement to not protest Twitter requires serious trust, but I would much rather offer a mostly usable technology to people trying to organize than have it entirely blocked.

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Andrew Schrock is a Ph.D student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on mediated creativity and collaboration in online and blended (online/offline) communities, as well as cultural histories of cloud computing. He is currently a research assistant to Anne Balsamo (Director of Emergent Technologies and Culture at the Annenberg Innovation lab), an Innovation lab fellow, and a member of Henry Jenkins’ Civic Paths research group.

Breakdown of the Twitter takedowns

UPDATE 1/30 @ 4:39: I created a Twitter account that will send out links to all non-DMCA takedown notices as they come in. Just follow @TakedownTweets and please RT to spread the word!

It’s probably a little too late, but before we all freak out and boycott Twitter further, let’s look at who has been requesting takedowns, what media were involved, and where they are from. Twitter posted 4411 cease & desist notices on Friday through Wendy Seltzer’s Chilling Effects website. The Twitter release of takedown notices was strangely timed, immediately following the height of SOPA protests and alongside their (more criticized) public statement that they will work with local authorities to filter tweets accessed from specific countries.

CLICK ON THE MANY EYES LINKS FOR INTERACTIVE VERSIONS. They are really quite a lot more usable.

Takedown requests by media
[ link to many eyes ]

What kind of stuff is being taken down? First, they are all DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) requests. Every one. So Twitter isn’t censoring protesters yet – if they do you can bet you will hear about it – and there’s good reason to think they are trying to err on the side of not censoring tweets. For one, there is a pretty easy work-around, at least of today, 1/28/12. Second, Twitter is probably holding its nose and retaining a good amount of leverage with what is a “reasonable” request. DMCA requests are also totally run of the mill for any service provider and you kind of must comply to stay in business. As Nancy Messieh puts it, “Twitter isn’t censoring you. Your government is.”

Not surprisingly, the requests are mostly related to links to media like music (1225), DVDs [I remember those things?] (142), and movies (141). The company Web Sheriff seems to be particularly vigilant in making requests, and for some reason have their own category of request. So does cricket (hey, it’s popular worldwide). Only 27 out of the 4411 were for adult material. Twitter isn’t a huge porn trading base, with the exception of some pesky bots. A small number (13) were for avatars. Yes, those little images that you mostly see as 48 x 48 squares. Another kind of amusing side to this is that the results on ChillingEffects for images mostly seem to include the links to the image source. (Should we make a takedown request for… a takedown request?)

Takedown requests by requester
[ link to many eyes ]

Who is making the requests? the big media conglomerates are there, but really not in the numbers that you might expect compared with the numbers that they are probably sending out to, say, cable modem subscribers that download shaky hand-cam torrents of pirated movies pre-opening day. Magnolia Pictures, a “theatrical and home entertainment distribution arm of the Wagner/Cuban Companies, a vertically-integrated group of media properties co-owned by Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban,” took the lions share.

Takedown requests by Country
[ link to many eyes ]

Where are they? The UK submitted more takedown requests (2194) than the USA (1815), mainly on the back of Web Sheriff, which is based out of England. Next in line was Belgium with 164. China and Saudi Arabia racked up 1 request each. Hardly a case of, as Forbes put it when talking about withholding Tweets based on local government, “accepting defeat by fascists.” Or, if they are fascists, right now they are American and British.

Takedown requests by month
[ link to many eyes ]

When were they made? I don’t put much stock in this data because it seems like companies accumulate lists of problematic tweets and then push out a bunch of requests in a row. So take the above graph with a grain of salt.

What does it mean? The takedown notice data reinforce several points. It really throws into stark relief how ineffective cease & desist orders are in curtailing the flow of content. Requests are mostly about tweets that have links to copyrighted material, such as through a torrent or download site. TechCrunch made the observation that some of the notices referenced bots, or automated programs that automatically collect and relay messages. Cease & desist orders to Twitter do nothing to curtail the spread of media. Remember, Twitter doesn’t host these media and the number of C&Ds is miniscule compared to the billions (trillions!) of tweets out there. It’s also mostly a conversation between and western media conglomerates and tech companies. Given that the requests so far rely on DMCA, this is also not surprising.

Personally I feel that Twitter is doing pretty much the minimum they can to stay in business. Like complying with laws of the United States in a paranoid climate from the Megaupload affair, leading to services such as Filesonic turning off the ability to share files with others and effectively removing any utility the site had. Twitter has done a valuable service by making takedown notices public, which they aren’t required to do. What would be more useful is if they were in a form that could be more easily accessed and reusable than a table-based HTML page. Google’s transparency report is quite comprehensive and provides a raw data set, PDF, and data visualizations. There are a lot of data not available in the visualizations above because they are difficult to scrape from the site.

If anyone wants the complete tab-delimited text file for the scraped data, it has some funky data that needs to be cleaned. You can see this in the set below, which has multiple requesters that should be consolidated. But I’m happy to post it if there’s any interest, just msg me on Twitter @aschrock.

Caveats

• Data were collected using a “web scraper,” which traverses a website much as you do with a web browser, and automatically collects textual data. Because not all of the DCMA notices followed the same format, not all data could be automatically collected in all cases. They probably could be.
• Each DMCA notice may be linked to several (likely related) incidents. The above data only looks at the first one. So the data set is of takedown requests, not of the total amount of offending media/links posted on Twitter.
• The data set used to generate the graphs above is public on IBM’s Many Eyes site. It contains the same information as on the website, just in a more easily-accessible format.