Unlike Us: Understanding Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives

via Geert Lovink/Spectre list

Unlike Us: Understanding Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives

Invitation to join the network (a series of events, reader, workshops,
online debates, campaigns etc.)

Concept: Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures/HvA, Amsterdam) and
Korinna Patelis (Cyprus University of Technology, Lemasol)

Thanks to Marc Stumpel, Sabine Niederer, Vito Campanelli, Ned Rossiter,
Michael Dieter, Oliver Leistert, Taina Bucher, Gabriella Coleman, Ulises
Mejias, Anne Helmond, Lonneke van der Velden, Morgan Currie and Eric
Kluitenberg for their input.

Summary
The aim of this proposal is to establish a research network of artists,
designers, scholars, activists and programmers who work on 'alternatives
in social media'. Through workshops, conferences, online dialogues and
publications, Unlike Us intends to both analyze the economic and
cultural aspects of dominant social media platforms and to propagate the
further development and proliferation of alternative, decentralized
social media software.

If you want to join the Unlike Us network, start your own initiatives in
this field or hook up what you have already been doing for ages,
subcribe to the email list. Traffic will be modest. Soon there will be a
special page/blog for the initative on the INC website. Also an
independent social network will be installed shortly, using alternative
software. More on that later! List
info:http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/unlike-us_listcultures.org

Background
Whether or not we are in the midst of internet bubble 2.0, we can all
agree that social media dominate internet and mobile use. The emergence
of web-based user to user services, driven by an explosion of informal
dialogues, continuous uploads and user generated content have greatly
empowered the rise of participatory culture. At the same time, monopoly
power, commercialization and commodification are also on the rise with
just a handful of social media platforms dominating the social web.
These two contradictory processes ? both the facilitation of free
exchanges and the commercial exploitation of social relationships ? seem
to lie at the heart of contemporary capitalism. On the one hand new
media create and expand the social spaces through which we interact,
play and even politicize ourselves; on the other hand they are literally
owned by three or four companies that have phenomenal power to shape
such interaction. Whereas the hegemonic Internet ideology promises open,
decentralized systems, why do we, time and again, find ourselves locked
into closed corporate environments? Why are individual users so easily
charmed by these 'walled gardens'? Do we understand the long-term costs
that society will pay for the ease of use and simple interfaces of their
beloved 'free' services?

The accelerated growth and scope of Facebook?s social space, for
example, is unheard of. Facebook claims to have 700 million users, ranks
in the top two or three first destination sites on the Web worldwide and
is valued at 50 billion US dollars. Its users willingly deposit a myriad
of snippets of their social life and relationships on a site that
invests in an accelerated play of sharing and exchanging information. We
all befriend, rank, recommend, create circles, upload photos, videos and
update our status. A myriad of (mobile) applications orchestrate this
offer of private moments in a virtual public, seamlessly embedding the
online world in users? everyday life.

Yet despite its massive user base, the phenomena of online social
networking remains fragile. Just think of the fate of the majority of
social networking sites. Who has ever heard of Friendster? The death of
Myspace has been looming on the horizon for quite some time. The
disappearance of Twitter and Facebook ? and Google, for that matter ? is
only a masterpiece of software away. This means that the protocological
future is not stationary but allows space for us to carve out a variety
of techno-political interventions. Unlike Us is developed in the spirit
of RSS-inventor and uberblogger Dave Winer whose recent Blork project is
presented as an alternative for ?corporate blogging silos?. But instead
of repeating the
entrepreneurial-start-up-transforming-into-corporate-behemoth formula,
isn't it time to reinvent the internet as a truly independent public
infrastructure that can effectively defend itself against corporate
domination and state control?

Agenda
Going beyond the culture of complaint about our ignorance and loss of
privacy, the proposed network of artists, scholars, activists and media
folks will ask fundamental and overarching questions about how to tackle
these fast-emerging monopoly powers. Situated within the existing
oligopoly of ownership and use, this inquiry will include the support of
software alternatives and related artistic practices and the development
of a common alternative vision of how the techno-social world might be
mediated.

Without falling into the romantic trap of some harmonious offline life,
Unlike Us asks what sort of network architectures could be designed that
contribute to ?the common?, understood as a shared resource and system
of collective production that supports new forms of social organizations
(such as organized networks) without mining for data to sell. What
aesthetic tactics could effectively end the expropriation of subjective
and private dimensions that we experience daily in social networks? Why
do we ignore networks that refuse the (hyper)growth model and instead
seek to strengthen forms of free cooperation? Turning the tables, let's
code and develop other 'network cultures' whose protocols are no longer
related to the logic of 'weak ties'. What type of social relations do we
want to foster and discover in the 21st century? Imagine dense, diverse
networked exchanges between billions of people, outside corporate and
state control. Imagine discourses returning subjectivities to their
'natural' status as open nodes based on dialogue and an ethics of free
exchange.

To a large degree social media research is still dominated by
quantitative and social scientific endeavors. So far the focus has been
on moral panics, privacy and security, identity theft,
self-representation from Goffman to Foucault and graph-based network
theory that focuses on influencers and (news) hubs. What is curiously
missing from the discourse is a rigorous discussion of the political
economy of these social media monopolies. There is also a substantial
research gap in understanding the power relations between the social and
the technical in what are essentially software systems and platforms.
With this initiative, we want to shift focus away from the obsession
with youth and usage to the economic, political, artistic and technical
aspects of these online platforms. What we first need to acknowledge is
social media's double nature. Dismissing social media as neutral
platforms with no power is as implausible as considering social media
the bad boys of capitalism. The beauty and depth of social media is that
they call for a new understanding of classic dichotomies such as
commercial/political, private/public, users/producers,
artistic/standardised, original/copy, democratising/ disempowering.
Instead of taking these dichotomies as a point of departure, we want to
scrutinise the social networking logic. Even if Twitter and Facebook
implode overnight, the social networking logic of befriending, liking
and ranking will further spread across all aspects of life.

The proposed research agenda is at once a philosophical, epistemological
and theoretical investigation of knowledge artifacts, cultural
production and social relations and an empirical investigation of the
specific phenomenon of monopoly social media. Methodologically we will
use the lessons learned from theoretical research activities to inform
practice-oriented research, and vice-versa. Unlike Us is a common
initiative of the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam University of
Applied Science HvA) and the Cyprus University of Technology in Lemasol.

An online network and a reader connected to a series of events initially
in Amsterdam and Cyprus (early 2012) are already in planning. We would
explicitly like to invite other partners to come on board who identify
with the spirit of this proposal, to organize related conferences,
festivals, workshops, temporary media labs and barcamps (where coders
come together) with us. The reader (tentatively planned as number 8 in
the Reader series published by the INC) will be produced mid-late 2012.
The call for contributions to the network, the reader and the event
series goes out in July 2011, followed by the publicity for the first
events and other initiatives by possible new partners.

Topics of Investigation
The events, online platform, reader and other outlets may include the
following topics inviting theoretical, empirical, practical and
art-based contributions, though not every event or publication might
deal with all issues. We anticipate the need for specialized workshops
and barcamps.

1. Political Economy: Social Media Monopolies
Social media culture is belied in American corporate capitalism,
dominated by the logic of start-ups and venture capital, management
buyouts, IPOs etc. Three to four companies literally own the Western
social media landscape and capitalize on the content produced by
millions of people around the world. One thing is evident about the
market structure of social media: one-to-many is not giving way to
many-to-many without first going through many-to-one. What power do
these companies actually have? Is there any evidence that such ownership
influences user-generated content? How does this ownership express
itself structurally and in technical terms? What conflicts arise when a
platform like Facebook is appropriated for public or political purposes,
while access to the medium can easily be denied by the company? Facebook
is worth billions, does that really mean something for the average user?
How does data-mining work and what is its economy? What is the role of
discourse (PR) in creating and sustaining an image of credibility and
trustworthiness, and in which forms does it manifest to oppose that
image? The bigger social media platforms form central nodes, such as
image upload services and short ulr services. This ecology was once
fairly open, with a variety of new Twitter-related services coming into
being, but now Twitter takes up these services itself, favoring their
own product through default settings; on top of that it is increasingly
shutting down access to developers, which shrinks the ecology and makes
it less diverse.

2. The Private in the Public
The advent of social media has eroded privacy as we know it, giving rise
to a culture of self-surveillance made up of myriad voluntary, everyday
disclosures. New understandings of private and public are needed to
address this phenomenon. What does owning all this user data actually
mean? Why are people willing to give up their personal data, and that of
others? How should software platforms be regulated? Is software like a
movie to be given parental guidance? What does it mean that there are
different levels of access to data, from partner info brokers and
third-party developers to the users? Why is education in social media
not in the curriculum of secondary schools? Can social media companies
truly adopt a Social Network Users? Bill of Rights?

3. Visiting the Belly of the Beast
The exuberance and joy that defined the dotcom era is cliché by now. IT
use is occurring across the board, and new labour conditions can be
found everywhere. But this should not keep our eyes away from the power
relations inside internet companies. What are the geopolitical lines of
distribution that define the organization and outsourcing taking place
in global IT companies these days? How is the industry structured and
how does its economy work? Is there a broader connection to be made with
the politics of land expropriation and peasant labour in countries like
India, for instance, and how does this analytically converge with the
experiences of social media users? How do monopolies deal with their
employees? use of the platforms? What can we learn from other market
sectors and perspectives that (critically) reflect on, for example,
techniques of sustainability or fair trade?

4. Artistic Responses to Social Media
Artists are playing a crucial role in visualizing power relationships
and disrupting subliminal daily routines of social media usage. Artistic
practice provides an important analytical site in the context of the
proposed research agenda, as artists are often first to deconstruct the
familiar and to facilitate an alternative lens to understand and
critique these media. Is there such a thing as a social 'web
aesthetics'? It is one thing to criticize Twitter and Facebook for their
primitive and bland interface designs. How can we imagine the social in
different ways? And how can we design and implement new interfaces to
provide more creative freedom to cater to our multiple identities? Also,
what is the scope of interventions with social media, such as, for
example, the ?dislike button? add-on for Facebook? And what practices
are really needed? Isn?t it time, for example, for a Facebook ?identity
correction??

5. Designing culture: representation and software
Social media offer us the virtual worlds we use every day. From
Facebook's 'like' button to blogs? user interface, these tools empower
and delimit our interactions. How do we theorize the plethora of social
media features? Are they to be understood as mere technical functions,
cultural texts, signifiers, affordances, or all these at once? In what
ways do design and functionalities influence the content and expressions
produced? And how can we map and critique this influence? What are the
cultural assumptions embedded in the design of social media sites and
what type of users or communities do they produce? To answer the
question of structure and design, one route is to trace the genealogy of
functionalities, to historicize them and look for discursive silences.
How can we make sense of the constant changes occurring both on and
beyond the interface? How can we theorize the production and
configuration of an ever-increasing algorithmic and protocological
culture more generally?

6. Software Matters: Sociotechnical and Algorithmic Cultures
One of the important components of social media is software. For all the
discourse on sociopolitical power relations governed by corporations
such as Facebook and related platforms, one must not forget that social
media platforms are thoroughly defined and powered by software. We need
critical engagement with Facebook as software. That is, what is the role
of software in reconfiguring contemporary social spaces? In what ways
does code make a difference in how identities are formed and social
relationships performed? How does the software function to interpellate
users to its logic? What are the discourses surrounding software? One of
the core features of Facebook for instance is its news feed, which is
algorithmically driven and sorted in its default mode. The EdgeRank
algorithm of the news feed governs the logic by which content becomes
visible, acting as a modern gatekeeper and editorial voice. Given its
700 million users, it has become imperative to understand the power of
EdgeRank and its cultural implications. Another important analytical
site for investigation are the ?application programming interfaces?
(APIs) that to a large extent made the phenomenal growth of social media
platforms possible in the first place. How have APIs contributed to the
business logic of social media? How can we theorize social media use
from the perspective of the programmer?

6. Genealogies of Social Networking Sites
Feedback in a closed system is a core characteristic of Facebook; even
the most basic and important features, such as 'friending', traces back
to early cybernetics' ideas of control. While the word itself became
lost in various transitions, the ideas of cybernetics have remained
stable in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics and the
biopolitical arena. Both communication and information theories shaped
this discourse. How does Facebook relate to such an algorithmic shape of
social life? What can Facebook teach us about the powers of systems
theory? Would Norbert Wiener and Niklas Luhmann be friends on Facebook?

7. Is Research Doomed?
The design of Facebook excludes the third person perspective, as the
only way in is through ones own profile. What does this inbuilt
?me-centricity? imply for social media research? Does it require us to
rethink the so-called objectivity of researchers and the detached view
of current social research? Why is it that there are more than 200
papers about the way people use Facebook, but the site is ?closed? to
true quantitative inquiry? Is the state of art in social media research
exemplary of the 'quantitative turn' in new media research? Or is there
a need to expand and rethink methods of inquiry in social media
research? Going beyond the usual methodological approaches of the
quantitative and qualitative, we seek to broaden the scope of
investigating these media. How can we make sense of the political
economy and the socio-technical elements, and with what means? Indeed,
what are our toolkits for collective, transdisciplinary modes of
knowledge and the politics of refusal?

8. Researching Unstable Ontologies
Software destabilizes Facebook as a solid ontology. Software is always
in becoming and so by nature ontogenetic. It grows and grows, living off
of constant input. Logging on one never encounters the same content, as
it changes on an algorithmic level and in terms of the platform itself.
What does Facebook?s fluid nature imply for how we make sense of and
study it? Facebook for instance willingly complicates research: 1. It is
always personalized (see Eli Pariser). Even when creating ?empty?
research accounts it never gives the same results compared to other
people?s empty research accounts. 2. One must often be 'inside' social
media to study it. Access from the outside is limited, which reinforces
the first problem. 3. Outside access is ideally (for Facebook and
Twitter) arranged through carefully regulated protocols of APIs and can
easily be restricted. Next to social media as a problem for research,
there is also the question of social research methods as intervention.

9. Making Sense of Data: Visualization and Critique
Data representation is one of the most important battlefields nowadays.
Indeed, global corporations build their visions of the world
increasingly based on and structured around complex data flows. What is
the role of data today and what are the appropriate ways in which to
make sense of the burgeoning datasets? As data visualization is becoming
a powerful buzzword and social research increasingly uses digital tools
to make ?beautiful? graphs and visualizations, there is a need to take a
step back and question the usefulness of current data visualization
tools and to develop novel analytical frameworks through which to
critically grasp these often simplified and nontransparent ways of
representing data. Not only is it important to develop new
interpretative and visual methods to engage with data flows, data itself
needs to be questioned. We need to ask about data?s ontological and
epistemological nature. What is it, who is the producer, for whom, where
is it stored? In what ways do social media companies? terms of service
regulate data? Whether alternative social media or monopolistic
platforms, how are our data-bodies exactly affected by changes in the
software?

10. Pitfalls of Building Social Media Alternatives
It is not only important to critique and question existing design and
socio-political realities but also to engage with possible futures. The
central aim of this project is therefore to contribute and support
'alternatives in social media'. What would the collective design of
alternative protocols and interfaces look like? We should find some
comfort in the small explosion of alternative options currently
available, but also ask how usable these options are and how real is the
danger of fragmentation. How have developers from different initiatives
so far collaborated and what might we learn from their successes and
failures? Understanding any early failures and successes of these
attempts seems crucial. A related issue concerns funding difficulties
faced by projects. Finally, in what ways does regionalism (United
States, Europe, Asia) feed into the way people search for alternatives
and use social media.

11. Showcasing Alternatives in Social Media
The best way to criticize platform monopolies is to support alternative
free and open source software that can be locally installed. There are
currently a multitude of decentralized social networks in the making
that aspire to facilitate users with greater power to define for
themselves with whom share their data. Let us look into the wildly
different initiatives from Crabgrass, Appleseed, Diaspora, NoseRub,
BuddyCloud, Protonet, StatusNet, GNU Social, Lorea and OneSocialWeb to
the distributed Twitter alternative Thimbl. In which settings are these
initiative developed and what choices are made for their design? Let's
hear from the Spanish activists who have recently made experiences with
the n-1.cc platform developed by Lorea. What community does this
platform enable? While traditional software focuses on the individual
profile and its relation to the network and a public (share with
friends, share with friends of friends, share with public), the Lorea
software for instance asks you with whom to share an update, picture or
video. It finegrains the idea of privacy and sharing settings at the
content level, not the user?s profile. At the same time, it requires
constant decision making, or else a high level of trust in the community
you share your data with. And how do we experience the transition from,
or interoperability with, other platforms? Is it useful to make a
distinction between corporate competitors and grassroots initiatives?
How can these beta alternatives best be supported, both economically and
socially? Aren't we overstating the importance of software and isn't the
availability of capital much bigger in determining the adoption of a
platform?

12. Social Media Activism and the Critique of Liberation Technology
While the tendency to label any emergent social movement as the latest
'Twitter revolution' has passed, a liberal discourse of 'liberation
technology' (information and communication technologies that empower
grassroots movements) continues to influence our ideas about networked
participation. This discourse tends to obscure power relations and
obstruct critical questioning about the capitalist institutions and
superstructures in which these technologies operate. What are the
assumptions behind this neo-liberal discourse? What role do ?developed?
nations play when they promote and subsidize the development of
technologies of circumvention and hacktivism for use in ?underdeveloped?
states, while at the same time allowing social media companies at home
to operate in increasingly deregulated environments and collaborating
with them in the surveillance of citizens at home and abroad? What role
do companies play in determining how their products are used by
dissidents or governments abroad? How have their policies and Terms of
Use changed as a result?

13. Social Media in the Middle East and Beyond
The justified response to downplay the role of Facebook in early 2011
events in Tunisia and Egypt by putting social media in a larger
perspective has not taken off the table the question of how to organize
social mobilizations. Which specific software do the 'movements of
squares' need? What happens to social movements when the internet and
ICT networks are shut down? How does the interruption of internet
services shift the nature of activism? How have repressive and
democratic governments responded to the use of ?liberation
technologies?? How do these technologies change the relationship between
the state and its citizens? How are governments using the same social
media tools for surveillance and propaganda or highjacking Facebook
identities, such as happened in Syria? What is Facebook?s own policy
when deleting or censoring accounts of its users? How can technical
infrastructures be supported which are not shutdown upon request? How
much does our agency depend on communication technology nowadays? And
whom do we exclude with every click? How can we envision 'organized
networks' that are based on 'strong ties' yet open enough to grow
quickly if the time is right? Which software platforms are best suited
for the 'tactical camping' movements that occupy squares all over the
world?

14. Data storage: social media and legal cultures
Data that is voluntarily shared by social media users is not only used
for commercial purposes, but is also of interest to governments. This
data is stored on servers of companies that are bound to the specific
legal culture and country. This material-legal complex is often
overlooked. Fore instance, the servers of Facebook and Twitter are
located in the US and therefore fall under the US jurisdiction. One
famous example is the request for the Twitter accounts of several
activists (Gonggrijp, Jónsdóttir, Applebaum) affiliated with Wikileaks
projects by the US government. How do activists respond and how do
alternative social media platforms deal with this issue?

Contact details:

Geert Lovink (geert at xs4all.nl)
Korinna Patelis (korinna.patelis at cut.ac.cy / kpatelis at yahoo.com)

Institute of Network Cultures
CREATE-IT/Hogeschool van Amsterdam
www.networkcultures.org