Keynote speakers
Anne Helmond
The Like Economy and the Politics of Data in the Social Web
Since the introduction of the Open Graph Facebook is increasingly expanding beyond the limits of its platform, offering devices that can make every website and every web user part of Facebook. The Like button, now embedded in over 2 million websites, plays an important role in extending Facebook’s platform features into the web. The growing implementation of social plugins such as the Like button and Facebook’s Open Graph API create an infrastructure which constantly materializes, measures and multiplies social interactivity and affective investments. The platform creates a specific relation between economic value and the social by turning user activity into valuable data which may be sold to advertisers.
This calls for a critical investigation into the politics of data and dataflows by looking at the medium-specific devices that create and organize data and dataflows in the social web. Linking Facebook’s efforts to a historical perspective on the hit and link economy, what might be in the making is not only a social web, but a re-centralized, data intensive fabric – the Like economy.
How can Facebook users and non-Facebook users respond to their (un)willing contributions to the emerging Like Economy? What is the current state of data-mining practices of social media platforms and what tools, techniques and alternative platforms are available to make these these practices visible, address them and possibly subvert them?
Anne Helmond is PhD candidate with the Digital Methods Initiative, the new media PhD program at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. She previously studied at the Utrecht School of Arts where she received a bachelor degree in Interaction Design and a master degree in Interactive Multimedia (1999-2003) and received a bachelor and master degree in New Media from the University of Amsterdam (2004-2008). In her research she focuses on software-engine relations in the blogosphere and cross-syndication politics in social media. She also teaches new media courses in the Media Studies department.
Anne Helmond has a blog and you can contact her: anne@digitalmethods.net
Karin Spaink
Privacy is the Cornerstone of Personal Safety
We’ve been led to believe that giving up bits and pieces of our privacy and having our everyday lives minutely scrutinized, will enhance our security. But somehow it hasn’t. More and more people are being flagged simply because they demonstrate ‘odd behaviour’ and suddenly find themselves redefined as a security risk. Governments are wasting billions on tracking innocent citizens.
And nobody is paying much attention to the security of these amassed data. Data leaks run rampant. The same government agencies that are bent on identity checks, don’t seem to understand the concept of identity fraud, nor that their efforts make identity fraud more enticing. We need to push the notion of ‘data hygiene’: creating secure storage and safe protocols for the handling of personal data. Otherwise, these data collections will merely become a new target for criminals and a new vulnerability for citizens.
Meanwhile, governments and companies are inventing and enforcing all kinds of ICT-practices, -stratagems and -devices that are far from safe: from electronic public transportation vouchers and voting machines to hackable pacemakers and insulin pumps. Data privacy is essential. The lack of it can kill you – literally.
Karin Spaink has been writing about technology, internet, health, digital rights and politics since the early nineties. She’s written eleven books and hundreds of columns. Scientology sued her for ten years over alleged copyright infringement on the net, and she won. Her hack of two major Dutch hospitals in 2005 – proving the vulnerability of electronic patient records – caused a major debate in Parliament. She’s working on a book on the history of the public internet in The Netherlands. She was the chair of Bits of Freedom (the Dutch digital rights organization) from 1999 to 2006, and she’s the chair of the Dutch Big Brother Awards.
Website of Karin Spaink. More of the speaker here.
Alan N. Shapiro
How Can We Redefine Information in the Age of Social Media?
Sociologists have given different names to the society that is the successor to the industrial society of the production of physical goods: the post-industrial society, the post-modern society, the knowledge society, the network society, the telematic society, the information society. Beyond its restricted mathematical meaning, or its technical meaning as signs or signals in information science messaging, information more generally, in the sociology of work and culture, is about abstraction and complexity. Until now, information has been regarded as being like numbers, an ordered sequence of symbols, bits and bytes of data, a change in state of an object-oriented system, transparent signifieds only without the signifiers that shape the meanings (in the terminology of semiotics), a bunch of facts on file, the transmission or contents of messages while ignoring the media – language itself – that structures the messages at the most intricate detailed level. Now that we are in the age of social media like Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, and blogs, how should sociology redefine what is information? How can social media consciously evolve to become more democratic and supporting of human freedom and human rights, rather than unconsciously becoming “totalitarian” in new ways that are reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 or the social theories of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard?
Alan N. Shapiro is an interdisciplinary thinker who studied science-technology at MIT and philosophy-history-literature at Cornell University. He is the author of “Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance”, a leading work in science fiction studies and on the conception of futuristic technoscience. He is a practicing software developer, and is working on projects like “Computer Science 2.0” and “The Museum of the Future.” In 2010-2011, Shapiro spoke at the Transmediale, Ars Electronica, Plektrum, und ISEA art-media-technology festivals. He is recognised as one of the leading experts on the philosophy and cultural theory of Jean Baudrillard.
Website of Alan Shapiro, contains lecture notes of the keynote.
Paul Sturges
The Brain and e-Information: Lessons from Popular Neuroscience
We seem to access information in electronic form in ways so strikingly different from what was usual in the print age that this has become a source of anxiety and confusion. Is surfing swiftly through material in a range of text, graphic, audio and video formats, following links, sharing and contributing to cooperative (Wiki) information creation, using social media and other new forms of content and modes of communication, in some way inferior to the systematic study of texts in print format? The debate on this question may perhaps be best addressed by asking how the brain actually works. Are brain, mind and consciousness all much the same thing, implying that learning takes place essentially through the interrogation of knowledge purposefully acquired? In fact the study of neuroscience suggests that we are much more dependent on information, ideas and sensations that are acquired and processed by areas of the brain not always accessible to the conscious mind than we realise. If this is the case, might the intuitive aspects of e-information and e-learning offer a better fit for human need than the comparative rigidities of text-based learning? Important insights from the recent wealth of popular books on neuroscience will be offered to suggest arguments on how normal brain function relates to the modes and structures of e-information.
Paul Sturges has lectured and researched in more than 60 countries world wide, and has 50 publications, mainly on topics relating to intellectual freedom. He was Chair of IFLA’s FAIFE Committee 2003-9. He received the award of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2010 and the IFLA Medal in 2011.
